After Juan Martinez had won his village trial, and so the right to represent them in the Trans-America, it was decided that he would be sent to the mountains of the Sierra Tarahumare to train with a tribe of runners called the Tarahumares. He had taken almost a week to recover from the trial race, during which he had been daily massaged by the village’s medicine man, Carlos. Meat was virtually unknown in Quanto, but an ancient goat was slaughtered to provide Juan with the necessary protein, and daily he had struggled to digest its tough, teaklike flesh, carefully watched by Carlos and his mother and father. Daily, he trotted five miles over dusty broken roads, and with each day he found that running was becoming a little easier. Perhaps, he thought, he might have a talent for this distance-running; or perhaps it was only the goat meat.
In 1890 a Norwegian naturalist, Carl Lumholtz, had timed the Tarahumares running twenty-one miles in two hours whilst playing rarahipa, a ball-kicking game. His accounts were derided and forgotten. Much later, in 1926, the Mexican government had brought two Tarahumares to the high altitude of Mexico City for an exhibition run. The Indians had amazed sports writers by completing a sixty-five-mile course in nine hours thirty-seven minutes. A year later another Tarahumare had lopped over an hour from the record for the fifty-one mile distance between Kansas City and Austin, Kansas.
The Mexican government then asked a Tarahumares chief to send three of his runners to compete in a standard marathon. The chief responded by sending three women, one of whom finished in third place. The race organizers expressed surprise that the tribe’s best runners had been women. The chief replied that a short race like twenty-six miles was ideal for women, and that was why he had sent them.
To the villagers of Quanto, Juan was an investment. If he came back successful from the Trans-America then the subsistence economy of the village would be transformed. The villagers could lose little in this gamble; they had little to lose.
Juan had staggered home first of nineteen aspirants in the village trial, over a modest twenty-mile course around the village. Every saleable item in Quanto had then been sold to get him to the Tarahumares for training, and to pay for his onward passage to Los Angeles. Even then there had not been enough, and there had been recourse to the local moneylender for a loan at heavy rates of interest. Letters of introduction had been sent ahead to Manuel, the leader of the Tarahumare tribe, and three weeks later Juan Martinez set off towards the Sierra Tarahumare.
Juan had taken the train, the Ferrocarril Chihuahua Al Pacifico, to Chihuahua, then travelled by mule to the home of the tribe to which he had been sent at the village of Chogita. Chogita lay in a long, narrow valley and consisted of an avenue of adobe huts, each about half a mile apart.
When he arrived groups of tribesmen, faces and legs daubed with white paint and wearing coloured head-bands or sombreros, were chanting and dancing outside a hut. Juan realized he had come in the middle of a religious holiday and so he squatted on the other side of the rough road munching his food until the Tarahumares had jogged down the valley to the next hut.
The Communidad, the town hall where all tribal matters were settled, was in the middle of the village, and it was there that Juan met Manuel. The wiry old man had been a great runner in his youth, and knew well why Martinez had come. He had come to Chogita to be absorbed into a running culture, and he was soon to gain his first direct experience of it, for the chief told him that a forty-mile race was to be held the next day. It was not a rarahipa or a dowerami (hoop race), but a simple foot-race.
Juan had watched that night as the runners squatted in the flickering lights of their camp fires, oiling their legs with goat-grease and massaging them with boiled juniper branches. This part of their preparation completed, they huddled round the fire, smoking, eating tortilla and drinking coffee.
The race was a nightmare: forty miles of running over rough stony country at high altitude, at a steady eight miles an hour. The Tarahumare, wearing thonged leather sandals, shuffled evenly over the dry, brown mountains with never a break in their rhythm. Martinez kept up with the leaders for the first ten miles, then gradually felt his breathing become more and more laboured as he battled desperately in the thin air. Soon he was back among the youths and the old men, struggling to maintain even a modest six miles an hour. He finished last out of thirty runners, barely able to lift his feet from the ground as he staggered in the evening gloom towards the Communidad.
It took him three whole days to recuperate, lying on his back on a wool blanket on the dirt floor of the chief’s hut, as Manuel and his guests sat above him on crude log stools around the primitive, wood-burning stove, drinking coffee and talking in the local dialect. In those three days of recovery he had eaten the last of the cheese and dried goat’s meat which he had brought with him, but on the fourth day he began the Spartan dietary regime of the Tarahumares. This consisted of corn, squash and beans, of which the corn, used for tortillas, ground into pinole, pulped for cornmeal mush or mashed into a thick gruel, was the most important element.
When he started to run again he did so with the women, slow, daily five to ten-mile stints in the thin mountain air, covering forty miles in his first week. Then he followed the senior men on the forty-mile rarahipa runs in preparation for the competitions between Chogita and her neighbouring villages. The rarahipa runners ran without shoes because this made the kicking of the ball easier, but Juan ran behind them in sandals. He was not allowed to take part in the inter-village competitions but was able to absorb every detail of the runners’ preparations, down to the intricate personal tattooing of the legs, a ritual which each runner considered essential to success.
Within three months he was able to run over eighty miles a week, though he was never able to copy the low, clipped shuffle of the Tarahumares, his natural action being a prancing, high-stepping one. During this period his only confidant was Manuel, for whom Spanish was a second language. The hundreds of hours spent with the runners of the tribe contained only one language, the unspoken tongue of men linked by miles of running. The old man knew his purpose, though he could only have a dim idea of the great race in Los Angeles for which Martinez was preparing.
Then, after four months, he repeated his forty-mile race against the runners of the tribe. This time it was different. His body had now adapted, and he was able to stay with the Tarahumares all the way and use his greater basic speed to run away from them over the last three miles.
In the final two months he lifted his weekly mileage to one hundred and fifty miles and knew, at the end of this period, that he was now ready for the Trans-America. Manuel would accept no money for his stay at Chogita, only a wool blanket made by Martinez’s mother. The whole village came out to see him go, running as always up the steep slopes to gather at the Communidad. The chief said little on his departure. “Distinguish yourself,” he told him. “No man can ask more.”
The fitness gained by Juan Martinez in the mountains served him well in the first blistering days of the Trans-America and he was able to pick up good money for early stage prizes, which he immediately sent back to a bank in Mexico City for onward transmission to his village. He was also able to handle the altitude of the Rockies because of his mountain experience. Slowly, however, the daily mileages across the Great Plains began to take their toll and like the other runners he began to experience pain, not only in the muscles but in the joints. Some days even his bones seemed to hurt, and Martinez wept dry tears across the dust roads of Kansas.
As with the Tarahumares the common experience of running daily drew him closer to runners of whose culture and background he knew nothing – men from Glasgow, from Pennsylvania, men like Doc who seemed to have no home. All possessed an inner assurance which at first frightened him, but gradually he was drawn into their company. It was strange. They were, after all, competitors. What bound them was the daily challenge of the miles and behind it all the test of traversing a continent by foot. His responsibility to finish in the prize money to rescue the economy of his village receded. Rather, he tried every day, as Manuel had said, to distinguish himself. He knew that if he could do that then there could be no dishonour, whatever the eventual outcome of the race.
He had felt himself become steadily weaker after St Louis, particularly on the occasional hilly stretches. However, like McPhail and many others in the race, he had vowed that he would never walk. But this vow had often reduced him to a broken trot no faster than a walk, and more exhausting. Juan Martinez was now paying for years of malnutrition, and there was no way that by will alone he could overcome this handicap.
Doc and the others in the group could be of little help to him in his daily agonies, for they had to stay up with Capaldi, Mullins, Eskola and Dasriaux, all of whom were beginning to win stages and so creep up on aggregate time. By Wilmington, just over fifty miles from Chicago, Juan Martinez realized that his hopes of winning the Trans-America were dim; he now lay in thirty-fourth place. He knew, as a member of Doc’s group, that he would benefit equally from any share-out in New York, but that was not why he had come. He had come to make his mark, and that he had not yet done.
There was, however, still Chicago, the Windy City, to be approached in two separate stages, totalling fifty-six miles, with a stage prize for the final section of five hundred dollars. There his brother Emiliano, his wife and two children, lived and worked, and Martinez was determined to be first at the finish at Soldier’s Field stadium. His aim would be to save himself in the first stage, finishing back in the mid-fifties, and on the second stage to hang in with the leaders until the final mile and use his speed to leave them at that point.
Doc and his group knew that at least one man would be racing flat out on that second stage – Capaldi – who had been primed to win the section by a big money syndicate in Chicago, led by Nitti and Guzik. Capaldi and the All-American team management knew nothing of the syndicate’s connections with Capone’s men. Indeed, they had laid two thousand dollars through the syndicate on Capaldi. There was nothing illegal or underhand in this. Every stage was up for grabs, and it was certain that money had also been laid on other runners for the final stage into Chicago, as it had been on other stages throughout the Trans-America.
Doc and Hugh spent most of the night preceding the Chicago stage arguing with Martinez, trying to impress upon him the ruthlessness of men such as Nitti and Guzik, but the little Mexican had been adamant. It was the first time they had ever seen him angry.
“You say I to run slow? You say I dishonor myself in front of my own brother?” He had looked unbelievingly at Doc, tears in his great brown eyes.
Try as he might, Doc could not explain to Juan the danger he might face if he beat Capaldi. “I get beat, too bad. But golly Jesus, I run all the way into Chicago. My brother, Emiliano, he loses a whole day’s pay to see me!”
All they could hope for was that Martinez, now desperately weak, would not be able to hold the tough Italian-American into Chicago, and that the problem would resolve itself.
It was not for nothing that Chicago had been dubbed jocularly as “the armpit of the world”. As early as the end of the Civil War it had established itself as the world’s leading packer of meat, as Texas cattle drovers rode the herds north through Jayhawkers, pestilence and Indians north to the Chicago stockyards. Then in 1870 the fertile mind of Joseph McCoy had conceived the idea of a railhead town where cattle-herders could sell their herds at a point of intersection with the newly-built Trans-Continental railway, choosing Abilene as his site. Though Abilene faded almost immediately to be overtaken by other western towns such as Ellsworth, and McCoy died in poverty, Chicago went from strength to strength, as a centre for meat-packing. The simple equation, established after the Civil War, that eighty cattle were required to meet the needs of one hundred people made certain of that. It also made certain that Chicago stank of leather and excrement, and its winds made equally certain that the stink swept through the poorest areas of the city.
Like all-the industrial cities of the north, Chicago had been devastated by the Depression, and its poorer sections had that quality of desolation which was indistinguishable from Glasgow, Frankfurt or any of the other stricken cities of the Western world. On industrial wastelands, billycan soup and Mulligan’s stew endlessly boiled beside packing-case homes, just as they had in the IWW workers’ Camp Stand back in Nevada. Daily the soup-kitchens fed endless lines of shuffling, unshaven men, and daily the same men wandered the windy, broken streets, seeking employment.
In this desolation Chicago was matched by most of the industrial cities of the north, but there was another aspect in which it was a clear leader, and that was the extent of its gangsterdom and civic corruption. One of the first results of Prohibition had been a massive increase in the consumption of alcohol. A second and more serious consequence had been the emergence of the bootlegger and the gangster, and in the centralizing of power on a small number of these men. One such was Al “Scarface” Capone who, shielded for years by corrupt policemen, judges and politicians, had by the late 1920s come to dominate the town.
In 1930 local businessman Frank Knox, alarmed at the increasing power of Capone and his mobsters, had raised a fund of $75,000 and had formed a committee, “The Secret Six”, to challenge Capone’s authority. More important, Knox led a delegation to Washington to seek federal help in securing Capone’s downfall. The appointment, by a 191,000 majority, of Mayor Cermak to supplant “Big Bill” Thompson further weakened Capone’s position. Cermak had, however, agreed to honour Thompson’s commitment to Flanagan and his Trans-Americans. Indeed, he was glad to do so, for the arrival of Flanagan’s Trans-Americans was a ray of sunshine after the bleak winter of I931. Commentators predicted that the streets of Chicago would be thick with crowds to greet the runners and Soldier’s Field stadium was packed to capacity when the first competitors arrived at just after 6 p.m. that evening.
The first stage to Chicago was a deliberately easy one for Juan Martinez, who finally finished in fifty-fourth position, the stage being won by “Digger” Mullins, with Doc, McPhail and Dasriaux close behind, and Capaldi well-placed in twelfth position. A temporary camp was set up in a rocky field by the roadside, just north of Plainfield, and the runners given three hours’ rest before the final twenty-seven-mile stage into Chicago.
Martinez felt tired even before Willard Clay fired the gun that sent nine hundred and seventy-one runners on their way towards Soldier’s Field stadium at 3 p.m. that afternoon in bright spring sunshine. For the first fifteen miles, covered in two hours and fifteen minutes, Martinez stayed in the centre of the leading pack of twenty-odd runners, noting that Capaldi was always amongst the leaders.
Even in the first half of the stage Martinez ached from ankle to hip, his legs feeling leaden and sore, his high, prancing action pruned to a low clipped movement. But he gained heart as runner after runner dropped away, leaving at twenty miles a knot of six runners – himself, Capaldi, Mullins, Dasriaux, Bouin and Eskola. They moved through the industrial suburbs of Chicago, the murky, grey Illinois and Michigan canal on their right. Ahead of them, the Maxwell House Coffee Pot blared the inevitable Whiffenpoof song while Flanagan or Willard Clay informed the growing crowds of the race positions from the Trans-America bus. Behind the runners, ignoring the police, cars threw up clouds of dust and heavy carbon-monoxide fumes. The leaders gradually moved into the final three miles towards Lake Michigan, near whose shores Soldier’s Field stood.
With two miles to go, Capaldi and Martinez had shrugged off their four companions, who now ran in Indian file, forty yards or more apart, behind the two leaders.
Capaldi seemed tireless. He was a stocky, crablike runner, his swarthy legs beating a constant rhythm on the soft tarmac of the road. For once the wind of Chicago was a relief, and fortunately it was behind them.
Juan glued his eyes to Capaldi’s sweating back, a technique Doc had taught him back in Nebraska. He dreaded the moment when he might no longer be able to preserve that visual thread that bound the American to him, like some spider clinging to its web.
As a small boy he had experienced the extraction of a tooth, without pain-killer, at a free dental clinic. He had never forgotten the blinding sharpness of that moment; it was as if some insistent drummer was pounding on a drum called Pain, gaining strength with each strike. Thus it was now, and Juan ran locked in agony.
The stadium at last came into view, at the end of the long avenue, and together they ran oblivious to the crowds pushing against the chain of beefy policemen posted there to restrain them from spilling out on to the roadway. No contrast could have been greater: the hairy, squat Italian-American and the wraith-like Mexican; Capaldi expelling his breath in deep grunts and Martinez an octave higher in what was almost a sigh. Capaldi’s eyes were set under bushy, black eyebrows and his thin moustache dripped sweat on to lips flecked with foam. In contrast, Martinez’s eyes stood out in his head as if he were straining to catch sight of a stadium miles in the distance.
Only half a mile to go. Then suddenly, like a ship slipped off its moorings, Juan Martinez was free. Capaldi was spent, and although Martinez did not dare look back he could sense that the American had broken and had dropped to a trot. The knowledge gave him added strength and unconsciously he increased his leg-speed, leaving Capaldi even further adrift. The following cars and motor-cycles cruising slowly on his right honked in response to his efforts, and he continued to pile on the pace, his breath issuing from him in small rhythmic screams. But Juan Martinez, running in a closed world of accepted pain, could not hear them. Nor could he hear his brother’s shout from the crowd on his left as he came within two hundred yards of Soldier’s Field, with Capaldi grunting over a hundred yards behind.
On his right, a black Ford limousine which had tracked him for over three miles drew slowly in line with the little Mexican. The driver’s window descended revealing the swarthy unshaven face of Frank Nitti, a spent cigar was thrown out, to land just in front of the unheeding Martinez. Then, abruptly, the car swung in hard to the left, its rearside wing hitting Martinez with a sickening thud on the right thigh. Somewhere in the crowd a woman screamed – the last sound which Juan Martinez heard as he fell helplessly to the pavement, his head landing with an audible crack on its hard surface. As crowds burst through the police cordon to surround the stricken Mexican the limousine reversed, turned and accelerated back the way it had come.
A few seconds behind, Capaldi, only dimly aware of what had occurred, chugged past into Soldier’s Field entrance. Five minutes elapsed before Doc and his following group heard the blare of sirens as they approached the scene and knew from voices in the crowd only that Martinez had somehow fallen.
Ten minutes later Doc, Mullins, Morgan and McPhail ran four laps round the packed stadium to the roar of fifty thousand excited Chicagoans, as Capaldi, standing on a podium, wreathed in flowers and wearing a crown of laurel leaves, waved to the crowd. As Doc approached the finishing line in third position, followed some fifty yards behind by Mullins and Morgan, with McPhail fading a hundred yards behind them, he caught sight of Flanagan. The Irishman sat on a bench on the home straight, behind the podium, surrounded by flouncing majorettes dressed in his immaculate Tom Mix costume. His elbows were on his knees, his face cupped deep in his hands.
It was common gossip in Washington that every week President Hoover would hold a “medicine balls” cabinet, an exercise session with the leading members of his government. Each time, as the session began, President Hoover would say, “Gentlemen, have you got that fellow Capone yet?” Fifteen minutes later, facing the red, perspiring members of his cabinet, he would stop. “Remember,” he would say, “I want that man in jail.”
It was easier said than done, but treasury agent Pat O’Rourke was sent to work on the weakest aspect of Capone’s kingdom – his tax affairs. The first to be caught out was the gangster’s brother, Ralph “Bottles” Capone, whose only previous indictment had been for scaring a horse. “Bottles” got three years in the state penitentiary and a ten-thousand-dollar fine.
Capone himself was to take longer. However, by the time the Trans-America hit Chicago, on 23 May, plans for his downfall were well in hand, and his indictment less than a month away.
Doc Cole and Ernest Bullard approached Flanagan’s darkened caravan and knocked uncertainly on the door. It was a few moments before a light came on and Flanagan released the door-catch. The two visitors blinked in the bright light as Flanagan took a large white handkerchief from his pocket and loudly blew his nose. They could see that he was red-eyed, though he turned quickly from them to pick up an almost empty bottle of whiskey.
“Drink?” he asked gruffly.
They both shook their heads and sat down slowly.
“Hope you don’t mind if I do,” he said, pouring out the last of the bottle into a large glass before dropping it into the waste-bin beside his desk. He sat down on his rocking-chair, then sniffed again.
“I’ve got one helluva cold,” he explained. “One helluva cold.” He sat back, fingering his glass. “And it’s been one godawful day,” he added grumpily.
“Yes,” said Doc. “It’s sure been that.”
Bullard spoke first. “The press boys have come up with some money for Martinez’s next of kin. It isn’t much – eight hundred and forty-seven dollars.” He placed a crumpled brown envelope on the desk.
Flanagan summoned a smile. “Thanks. I’ll see that they get it.” He sat back in his chair. “Poor little guy. All this way, to be taken out by those animals.”
“We think we know who did it,” said Doc.
“Who?” asked Flanagan, sitting up.
“Two of Capone’s boys,” answered Doc. “Names of Nitti and Guzik. They had a couple of thousand dollars on Capaldi, at good odds, and Martinez got in their way. That’s my guess.”
Flanagan shook his head. “Two thousand lousy bucks. I would have given them the money.” He paused. “Do you think Capone had anything to do with it?”
“Most unlikely,” answered Bullard. “He’s up to his neck in his own problems at the moment. In fact, Martinez’s death is probably an embarrassment to him. No, I’ve talked to some of the betting fraternity; Guzik and Nitti were just doing a little work on their own behalf.”
“So what do we do about it?” said Flanagan. “Keep on the move to New York and just forget it ever happened?”
“I know it sounds callous,” said Doc. “But we won’t do Juan any good by folding up now. Even from a practical point of view, if my group ends up in the money Martinez’s relatives will still get their cut, just as if he were alive. If we stop now, his family and his village both lose out.’
Flanagan picked up his glass, saw that it was empty, and placed it back on the desk at his side. For a moment he rocked back and forward in his chair, head down, without speaking. Then he looked up at both men.
“It’s just that I feel so . . . so goddam useless. After all, it was me who brought Martinez all the way from Mexico. And tomorrow we bury him in some unknown grave. So help me, I’ve got to do something or I’ll burst.”
“Cole’s right,” said Bullard firmly. “We know how you feel, Flanagan, but it would serve no real purpose to fold up now.”
“Okay,” said Flanagan thoughtfully. “So we go on to New York. But what do we do about the bastards who killed him?”
“Now that’s where I come in,” said Doc. “You see, I have this lady friend . . .”
At 11a.m. on the morning of 24 May 1931, nine hundred and seventy-one Trans-Americans, the entire body of Flanagan’s staff and the majority of the attendant press corps stood at Juan Martinez’s grave in the light drizzle of Chicago’s Oak Park Cemetery. To many of the Trans-Americans the scene was unreal. For two months the little Mexican had skipped across the dirt-roads of America, through the Mojave, over the Rockies, across the flat, dry plains of Kansas, seemingly indestructible. To many there it seemed inconceivable that he would not be with them again at the starting line at three o’clock that afternoon.
Flanagan, head bowed, black armbands on his light summer suit, sprinkled moist earth into the grave, to be followed by Doc, Hugh and a score of other runners who had known the little Mexican well. Soon the gravediggers were at their task, scooping soil on to the brown casket below.
Flanagan looked up and turned to Morgan at his side. He glanced at his wristwatch.
“Five minutes past eleven,” he said. “About four hours to go.” He beckoned to Doc to join him. “But first,” he said, his voice hardening, “we have a little business with a certain Mr Capone.”
Al “Scarface” Capone had always claimed that he received his scar as a machine-gunner in World War 1. The true story was less to his credit: he had got himself cut during a brawl over a whore at a Brooklyn dance hall.
The Martinez affair had indeed come at a bad time for him, for the taxmen were closing in. It was ironic: ten years of bootleg booze, torturings and killings without a single conviction, and now he was about to be tied up by a load of pen-pushing tax inspectors.
Capone himself was a bundle of contradictions. He was an excellent man-manager, but like many men who come up the hard way he possessed a narrow view of money. Even a few years back, in 1924, when the tax inspectors had first homed in on him, he could have easily bought his way out legitimately for a relatively small sum. The dollars had poured in faster than he could count them and were stashed away in safety deposit boxes all over Illinois; but in his view what was his was his, and the opportunity to go legitimate had passed, never to return. Now O’Rourke had penetrated his organization, and Capone knew he was only weeks away from an indictment.
And those knuckleheads Nitti and Guzik! The Trans-America’s arrival in Chicago was big news; and two minor hit-men had managed to put the spotlight on the Capone organization, all for a few thousand bucks.
Capone sat back in his black leather chair in his suite in “Camp Capone”, the Lexington Hotel, and prodded at his front teeth with a soft, medicated toothpick. He picked up the morning newspaper, which headlined Martinez’s death, scanned it, then wearily replaced it on the desk in front of him. It was essential that he lower the temperature on the Trans-America tragedy. He had bigger fish to fry.
So the feds called him a bootlegger. Okay, so it was bootleg when it was on the trucks, but when your host at the country club offered it to you on a silver platter – hell, that was called hospitality. What had he done? He had supplied a legitimate demand. He called it business. They said he had violated the Prohibition laws. But who hadn’t?
His reverie was broken by a knock at the door. Capone pressed the buzzer on his right.
Frank Nitti entered the room. He was wearing an expensive black pin-striped double-breasted suit which sat uneasily upon his squat muscular frame. Nitti was known within Capone’s circle as “the enforcer”. A ruthless killer, he had been employed as muscle for the Capone organization for the last two and a half years, following an undistinguished career as a prize-fighter and speakeasy bouncer.
“Flanagan to see you, boss,” he said apprehensively, his eyes on the thickly-carpeted floor.
Capone beckoned in the Irish entrepreneur, who was followed by Mike Morgan, dressed in blue denims, a turtle-necked jersey and black leather jerkin. They sat down in front of Capone’s massive teak desk. For a moment even Flanagan was quiet, in awe of the most dangerous man in the United States; in contrast Morgan showed no signs of concern.
Capone broke the silence first. “So what can I do for you, gentlemen?”
“You know what happened yesterday,” said Flanagan. “It’s all in the newspapers in front of you. One of my runners, Juan Martinez, was killed.” The words poured quickly from him, uttered without any of his normal confidence.
“I’d heard. I’ve been following your boys since way back in Los Angeles,” said Capone softly. “Real sorry to hear it. A bad business.”
“We know who did it,” Morgan interjected. “It was two of your boys – Nitti and Guzik.”
Capone smiled, withdrew a cigar from his desk and beckoned Nitti to light it.
“You’re a brave man to come here and say that, Mr – ?”
“Morgan.”
“Mr Morgan. Or a foolish one. I suppose you have proof?”
“You know we don’t,” said Flanagan, gripping the arms of his chair.
“So what exactly do you want me to do?”
The Irishman’s voice grew stronger. “First, we want ten grand sent to Martinez’s next of kin. We want it in cash, and we want it right now.”
Capone puckered his plump cheeks and whistled. “Ten G’s. For something I didn’t do, and you can’t even prove. You got plenty of gall, Mr Flanagan, I’ll give you that.”
Flanagan opened his briefcase and withdrew a crumpled piece of paper from it. He pushed it across the desk to Capone.
“Perhaps this might help you change your mind.”
Capone picked up the paper and looked at it for a moment.
“How did you get hold of this?”
“That’s none of your business,” said Flanagan. “We’ve got plenty more, and it all goes straight to the treasury in Washington unless you follow our terms.”
“Your terms?” Capone’s lips twisted in a scowl. “Flanagan, I just say the word and you guys end up in a marble ghetto.”
“No,” said Flanagan. “Any harm comes to us and two files of these documents are on their way to secretary of the treasury, Mellon. When they do you’ll be travelling down a corridor thirty years long.”
Capone took the cigar from his mouth and threw it into the wastepaper-basket. He placed both of his soft, plump hands on the table in front of him and leaned forward.
“What guarantee do you give me that if I do what you want you still won’t hand these papers to the treasury?”
“You have my word,” said Flanagan, simply.
“Your word? The word of some jumped-up Mick, with a load of clapped-out runners? What the hell do you think I am?”
“Well, that’s all you’ve got,” said Flanagan, reddening.“Take it or leave it.”
Capone sat back in his chair and looked Flanagan squarely in the eye. Then he slowly opened the drawer of his desk and drew out ten crisp bundles of notes, counted them, and threw them across the table.
“There,” he said. “Happy?”
“That’s better,” said Flanagan. “But we haven’t quite finished yet.”
“Well,” said Capone, “what else do you want?”
“Just twenty minutes of your time.”
Capone’s face showed his perplexity.
“Our Mr Morgan here wants ten minutes’ time with each of your colleagues Nitti and Guzik,” said Flanagan. “No guns, no knives; just fists.”
Capone’s plump face broke into, a smile as he looked at Morgan, sitting impassively on Flanagan’s left, then at Nitti, smiling behind him at the door.
He pressed a buzzer on the desk on his right and spoke into a speaker.
“Get Guzik in here.” Turning back to Flanagan, he added,
“I think your Mr Morgan here may have taken on a little more than he can handle.” ’
“We’ll just have to see about that,” answered Flanagan, gathering up the money into his attaché case and locking it firmly. He looked at his watch. “Let’s say two o’clock, Mr Capone, at Soldier’s Field, where we finished yesterday. And just you, Nitti and Guzik. No one else.”
“You got my word,” Capone said. “There’ll be no one else. No need for it.” His plump face creased into a smile.
Two hours later Capone’s black Ford cruised into Soldier’s Field stadium, driving through its black wrought-iron gates beyond the car park and on into the entrance to the track, sited at the beginning of the home straight. All around workmen were dismantling Trans-America banners or removing bottles and trash from the empty terracings. The bare flag-poles stood gaunt in the cloudy afternoon sky, their ropes flapping sharply in the wind. Above them, white gulls wheeled and screamed, occasionally swooping to pick up a morsel of food left by spectators. The stadium was dead; all that had made it so alive the day before had gone.
Except the Trans-Americans. Like guards, they ringed the stadium perimeter, armed with baseball bats and fence-posts. Capone’s eyes narrowed as he noted their presence. The Ford stopped at the entrance to the track. Standing there, awaiting them, were Flanagan, Morgan, Packy Paterson and Lily.
Capone saw Lily Carson and his soft lips tightened.
There were no introductions or small talk. Flanagan simply beckoned Capone and his men to a side door leading to the area under the main stand. He knocked twice on the door, which was unbolted from the inside by a thin, grizzled old groundsman. He tipped his cap to Flanagan and looked at Capone.
“You got some business here?”
Flanagan answered for him. “Yes,” he said. “Mr Capone has some business here.”
The Irishman ushered Capone, Nitti and Guzik into a gloomy corridor. Morgan and Paterson followed. Then he beckoned the old man to bolt the door and led the group along the stone-floored corridor, their feet echoing as they followed its curved path beneath the main stand. Finally, after walking some fifty yards, Flanagan stopped outside a door on the left and knocked twice. It was opened immediately, by Capaldi. The bronzed Italian-American gulped as he recognized the gangster.
“They didn’t ought to have done it, Mr Capone,” he said, moving past him apprehensively. Capone did not answer, but together with his men entered the room, followed this time only by Morgan and Flanagan. Paterson and Capaldi remained guard outside.
In the centre of the room stood a massive, sunken, tiled bath. Flanagan pointed to it then beckoned towards Jake Guzik. “Bath time,” he said.
Guzik looked at Capone, who nodded. The hoodlum swallowed, loosened his tie, took off his grey jacket and placed it on a hook, then slowly released his cuff-links and rolled up the sleeves of his blue silk shirt. Morgan’s face was impassive. He took from his pocket a pair of black leather gloves and pulled them on. Then he pointed to the bath.
“In there,” he said.
Guzik walked slowly down the steps on to the white-tiled surface of the bath, followed by Morgan.
“Let’s leave them to it,” said Flanagan to Capone and Nitti, ushering them from the room and closing the door behind him.
The five men stood uneasily in the silent, gloomy corridor outside the locker room. Flanagan was the first to break the silence, taking from an inside pocket two thick Havanas and proffering one to Capone. As Capone took the cigar and Flanagan struck a match on the sole of his left shoe, there was a dull grunt from within the locker room: it sounded like Morgan. Capone smiled and bent to light his cigar. Packy Paterson glanced uneasily at Flanagan, who stood expressionless.
Then they heard a voice. It was Jake Guzik, screaming. The next clear sound was the scratching of fingernails on the inside of the door, followed by a body scraping down its side. There was a momentary whimper. Finally, silence.
The door opened and Morgan appeared, a trickle of blood seeping from his left nostril. He withdrew a handkerchief from the pocket of his denims and dabbed his nose.
“Looks like Mr Guzik didn’t want the full ten minutes,” he said, pulling open the door to reveal Guzik face down on the locker room floor, blood spilling from his nose and mouth.
“Didn’t seem to like the bath over-much either,” said Flanagan.
Frank Nitti walked over to his fallen comrade and pulled him round onto his back. Guzik’s face was a bloody mush. Nitti looked up desperately at his employer, then at Morgan.
“How’d he do this?” he said, turning to look round the room. “He got a club stashed somewhere?”
He continued to peer helplessly around the empty locker room, then finally his eyes went back to Capone. The older man was still sucking slowly on his cigar. As if making some inner decision, Capone suddenly tapped the ash of his cigar on to Guzik’s shirt.
“It’s your problem, Frank,” he said. “You’re a grown man. You got to take your licks.”
Morgan looked at Frank Nitti and pulled on the top of his right glove as Flanagan pulled the door shut.
“Your turn,” he said, as the door closed behind them.
When the Trans-Americans left Chicago along with them went Lily Carson, while the documents she had supplied on Capone’s finances were sent on to a safety deposit box in the Trans-America bank. In fact, for all the gangster’s worries, the documents were superfluous; treasury officials already had more than enough evidence to convict him. On 5 June 1931, he was indicted for tax evasion and on 20 October he was fined $50,000, with $30,000 costs, and sent to prison for eleven years.