Old Willie

William P. McGivern

This is a story I’ve heard told by old-timers around Chicago newspaper offices. They don’t insist it’s true, of course, since it hangs chiefly on the word of a reporter who was far more at home in speak-easies than he ever was at a typewriter. Still, parts of the tale can’t be explained away as the splintered dreams of a drunk. Maybe that’s why the old- timers go on telling the story…

It begins in 1927, prohibition time, when Chicago was run by a band of Sicilian immigrants under the austere leadership of a man named Al Capone. And it also begins when an amiable little man, whom everyone knew only as Old Willie, became interested in a shy Danish girl named Inger Anderson.

Willie was the handy man and janitor around the West Side boardinghouse where Inger roomed. He was a straight-backed, lightstepping character, with drooping gray mustaches and pale-blue eyes. He could have been in his middle sixties or seventies—it was hard to say. Everyone at the boardinghouse liked him because of his obliging, courteous manner and consistent good humor, but they didn’t know very much about him; nor care a great deal.

Old Willie’s interest in Inger was purely fatherly, of course. He knew she’d come from a Minnesota village and he felt she needed looking after in the big city. He fussed over her as if she were a baby. Inger was pretty capable despite her shyness, but she was touched by Old Willie’s interest in her, and they became good friends.

Inger’s ambition was to become a concert singer. She had a pleasant, untrained voice which wouldn’t have excited a small-town choirmaster, but she loved to sing and was ready to do almost anything to fulfill her dreams. She signed up for voice lessons in the evenings and found herself a job as a hotel maid through an employment agency. She was thrilled at her luck in finding work so quickly. What she didn’t know was that the employment-agency director, spotting her as an earnest but unknowing Minnesota specimen, had assigned her to the hotel which was the headquarters of the Capone mob—the old Star at Wabash Avenue near Twelfth Street. Considering this, considering that the Star was filled with as choice a collection of gorillas as were ever assembled under one roof, Inger got along O.K. for the first few weeks. She cleaned the rooms, made beds and kept her eyes cast down when the sharply dressed torpedos stared insolently at her lovely, graceful figure and beautiful legs. One of the hoodlums, Blackie Cardina, a Sardinian with alert eyes and a strong, bold jaw, stared longer than any of the others, and then grinned.

Old Willie was horrified when Inger told him where she was working. They were talking in the parlor at the time. Inger had just finished her lesson and had been telling Old Willie about the skating and sledding in Minnesota, and about a boy named Lars who wanted to marry her, and then she said something about the Star Hotel.

“Listen, you get out of that place,” Old Willie said, shaking his head sternly. “Those are bad men, worse than rattlesnakes, and it’s no place for a girl like you.”

Inger was amused by Willie’s anxiety. She was young and very confident, and the thought that she couldn’t look out for herself struck her as funny. After all, she reasoned, she had been at the Star a month and no one had bothered her yet.

About a week after this talk, Inger came home much later than usual and went straight to her room. She didn’t come down to eat, and she didn’t practice her scales that night. Old Willie, vaguely troubled, tried to find out what was wrong, but she wouldn’t open her door, or even talk to him. The next day the landlady brought Inger up some food and talked to her for an hour or so. When she came out her eyes were red, and that night she glared at all the men boarders as if they were particularly repellent species of vermin.

For a month things went on this way. Inger wasn’t working at the Star any more. She stuck close to her room and wouldn’t see anyone, not even Old Willie. Then he learned from the landlady that Inger was leaving. She wasn’t going home. She was just leaving.

That brought him to a decision. He went up and knocked firmly on the door. “You might as well open up,” he said. “I’m sticking here until you do.”

There was a wait, and then, in a tired voice, Inger told him to come in. She was in bed looking pale and ill. Old Willie sat beside her and patted her arm with a thin, long-fingered hand.

“You’re in trouble, aren’t you, Inger?” he said.

She looked away from him, staring out at the bare, black winter trees.

“Who is it?” Old Willie said. Something had changed in his voice; it was curiously hard, insistent.

“I can’t talk about it.”

“You’ve got to, Inger. You got no father or brothers here.”

She moaned softly. “They mustn’t ever know.”

“No need for that. Tell me about it.”

Finally she told him, crying openly, her hand clutching his with desperate strength. It was the one they called Blackie, Blackie Cardina. He had followed her into a room, grinning. She had pleaded with him, begged him, and at last she had fought and screamed. But nothing had made any difference to Blackie. He had taken what he wanted…

When she finished, Old Willie sighed. “I’ll have a talk with him.”

“No, no,” Inger cried. “They—he’ll kill you. You don’t know what they’re like.”

“Now don’t worry about me,” Old Willie said in a soothing voice. “You try to sleep, and don’t be fretting.”

And with that he left her. Old Willie went first to his own room and reappeared in a few minutes wearing a long black frayed overcoat. The landlady met him at the foot of the stairs and asked him where he was going. Old Willie didn’t answer. He walked past her, his eyes fixed straight ahead, a tense, angry frown on his old face.

Old Willie reached the Star Hotel a little after noon. He stopped inside the revolving doors, looking like some country bumpkin who’d got into the wrong pew by mistake. And now, right at this point, is where the drunken reporter, Jake Mackey, enters the story in the role of an eyewitness.

Jake was at the Star that afternoon, sitting on a sofa and talking to one of Capone’s men. Maybe Jake was on a story. Maybe he was just hanging around for a drink. Anyway, he was there, slightly drunker than usual, and he noticed Old Willie immediately, because Old Willie with his drooping mustaches and long black overcoat was a sight to catch and hold the eye.

Old Willie stopped a bellboy and asked him where he might find Blackie Cardina. The bellboy jerked his thumb toward a card game at the far end of the lobby. Blackie was there, sitting behind a high stack of chips, a cigar in his strong teeth, grinning like a wolf because he was winning, and because, at that precise moment of his life, he thought the world was a place that had been kindly provided for him to loot, ravish and otherwise do with as he pleased.

He glanced up a few seconds later and saw the old man with drooping mustaches studying him somberly. Blackie paid no attention to him; he had looked up as he figured the odds against filling a belly straight.

“O.K., I take a card,” Blackie said, and snapped his fingers.

“Hold the deal,” Old Willie said quietly. “Which of you is a rat called Blackie Cardina?”

Blackie looked up again, seeing Old Willie for sure this time, and his little dark eyes narrowed dangerously. “You aren’t funny, old man,” he said.

“ ain’t trying to be,” Old Willie said. “I’m a friend of a girl used to work here. You had your fun with her, you slimy, snake-eating bastard, and now you’re going to pay for it. I want a thousand collars from you. That’ll help her out some. And you can figure the price cheap.”

Blackie got to his feet and it was difficult to judge from his expression whether he would start laughing or cussing. “Look, old man, get out,” he said at last, pointing to the door. “Get out. You hear? I don’t want to kick an old man into the street. I’ll let you walk, understand?” He got madder as he talked, and a flush of color surged up his throat and stained his dark features. “Get out!” he shouted. “Get out, you dirty, rotten old bum. Get out of here!”

“One thousand dollars,” Old Willie said, casually unbuttoning his long black overcoat.

The kill look in Blackie’s eyes deepened. “Who sent you here? Who are you?” he shouted, and reached for the gun in his shoulder holster. “I’ll teach you a lesson, goddamn it!”

Old Willie said something then, something which only Jake Mackey seems to have heard, and he said it in a voice that was proud and hard and confident. After that, although it was all part of one smoothly connected motion. Old Willie yelled, “Draw, you bastard!” and threw himself swiftly to one side in a low, springy crouch.

There was a lot of discussion later as to what exactly happened in the next few seconds. Two facts were incontrovertible: one, Old Willie somehow got a gun into his hand, and two, Blackie Cardina fell across the card table with a black hole burned neatly into his forehead. No one actually saw Old Willie draw a gun. The onlookers decided later it was probably fastened to a spring arrangement in his holster. Anyway, it got into his hand very fast, and the bullet from it got into Blackie’s skull even faster.

Old Willie didn’t let things get out of control. With a little wave of his big, old-fashioned revolver he backed Blackie’s friends away from the table and then coolly plucked a wallet from Blackie’s hip pocket.

He inspected the contents and stuffed the wallet into a pocket of his overcoat. After that he backed toward the doors, moving easily and lightly, the gun in his hand as steady as something carved from rock.

Jake Mackey said there was something about Old Willie then—something in his eye and manner—that made you want to shrink down in your chair and stay very quiet.

At the doors, Old Willie made a short speech. “Sit tight for five minutes. First man don’t think that’s a good idea is going to get himself killed.”

And then he walked out into the street and for five minutes a half-dozen of Al Capone’s hoodlums looked uneasily at Blackie’s body, and occasionally glanced up at the clock above the lobby desk.

They weren’t afraid to go outside, they said later. They weren’t afraid of an old man in a tattered overcoat who’d been lucky enough to plug Blackie between the eyes. Still, they didn’t go out, and they didn’t move.

Jake Mackey got on Old Willie’s trail right after the five minutes were up, and by checking the cab companies he found a hackie who had picked up an old party answering Willie’s description at the intersection of Twelfth Street and Wabash Avenue. This took time, of course; it was late in the afternoon when Jake cautiously approached the boardinghouse where the cab driver had taken Old Willie and had dropped him.

And by then it was too late. Old Willie had been there, all right, but only long enough to give Inger a roll of money, and then pack up his few things and leave.

He didn’t say good-by to anyone, but simply strolled off down the darkened street, a slender old man with faded blue eyes and a curiously youthful stride. No one watched him leave.

Jake Mackey was fascinated by what he’d seen at the Star Hotel, and he hung around Inger to get all the facts she could recall about Old Willie.

She told him how secretive Old Willie had always been, and how he liked to listen to her sing, and so forth, but she couldn’t tell him very much more.

He and Inger became good friends in the next week or so, and for a while Jake even thought he was falling in love with her. But nothing came of that. Inger had a miscarriage a week later, and after that packed up and went back to Minnesota.

She married the boy named Lars, and Jake carried the wedding announcement in his wallet, but finally lost it in a bar, the way clippings get lost in bars.

He never did pin down his story. He did a lot of checking on it, and spent a good deal of time in the library, but he never could prove it, and so he never wrote it.

Still, he knew that he had missed a great story by a hair’s breadth.

and in the years that followed he told the story around Chicago bars to anyone who would listen to him.

The thing that convinced him his story was true was the way Old Willie had handled that gun, and what Old Willie had said when Blackie asked him who he was—Blackie had asked him who he was, remember, just before digging for the gun in his shoulder holster. Old Willie’s answer had held no significance for the Sicilian immigrants at the card table, but it had raised the hairs on the back of Jake Mackey’s neck.

Old Willie had said, in a proud, hard, confident voice, “When I was a kid, they called me Billy.”

And that’s the way the old-timers tell Jake Mackey’s story. They don’t insist it’s true, of course—but they go on telling it.