G-Man Page 10

  “Bob, Dad’s not far from here. I think I’ll go over there and pay a visit while I’m here.”

  “Your dad deserves a visit,” remembered Swagger, and Andy trotted off.

  That left Swagger alone with a chunk of marble inscribed with the six-pointed star of the official law enforcer, over the inscription

  CHARLES F. SWAGGER

  1891–1942

  MAJOR, A.E.F.

  TOWN SHERIFF

  DUTY FIRST

  As to the last line, Bob thought, maybe so, maybe not. We’re sure going to try and find out.

  But there was another revelation and it carried an echo. His grandfather had been an officer. In a short war he’d made major. Which was odd, not because it confirmed Charles’s combat effectiveness and leadership ability but because his own father, Earl, had been so committed to remaining an NCO, something that had seemed DNA-level deep in the Swagger men, as Bob, despite offers, and in some cases pleas, had also chosen to so remain, and Bob’s son, Ray, who hadn’t even been raised by Swaggers but by his original Philippine adoptive family, also went the sniper’s way, and also stayed an NCO despite blandishments, and Ray was really smart, smarter than most generals.

  Bob tried to think this through. Why would such a thing be? One possibility had to do with the Swagger freakish shooting talent, way beyond the norm and way off the charts. Most Swagger men were shooters. That gift stood them well especially in war or gunfights in civilian society, but it meant that knowing that about themselves and taking pride in such a talent, they’d be drawn to ways to use it most productively. Thus, sniping, machine-gun-nest destroying, and highway patrolling, gangster hunting. So the Swagger preference would be to stay close to the gun, and a commissioned officer’s role would take him away from the gun and the man he was to a man who he would have to pretend to be.

  But another reason might be that Earl was decreeing his distance from Charles. If his father had risen beyond his shooting talents into the officers’ ranks, he would not. He was declaring himself to be not the same man. I will not my father be, Earl was saying. And thus Bob’s dynamic, a generation later and haunted by the death of the man he still considered the greatest he ever knew, is: I will my father be.

  Which brought Swagger back to Charles F. Swagger, moldering in the grave under an eroding chunk of marble, unvisited, unremembered, possibly unloved. But he died with the reputation for Duty, so he must have—sometime, somewhere, somehow—impressed someone.

  His phone buzzed and—it was never a sure bet—he heard it. He looked, saw the caller was Nick Memphis from Virginia.

  “Nick?”

  “How are you today, Doctor?”

  “My feet hit the ground before my nose, so that’s a good sign.”

  “Very promising. Look, I’ve got some stuff here. I can’t mail it down, but the old records show some definite possibilities that your grandfather was in the Bureau. And then—er, how can I say this?—out of the Bureau. Rather suddenly, rather dramatically.”

  “I’m betting he was a sonovabitch on wheels,” said Bob.

  “On wheels?” said Nick. “He may have been the first one through the sonovabitch sound barrier!”

  10

  THE BANKERS BUILDING, 19TH FLOOR

  CHICAGO

  June 1934

  “LOOK, HOLLIS,” said Charles, “I know you’re in everybody’s doghouse because of Little Bohemia. But that was before my time, so it don’t cut no ice with me. You work hard, play square, give me two honest days’ labor for every one on the calendar, and you’ll do all right by me.”

  “Yes sir,” said Hollis, who proved to be an earnest stalk of boy out of Iowa by way of law school.

  “I won’t hold your education against you, fair enough? Too many well-educated fools ’round this place, not enough sheriffs or cops.”

  “Yes sir.”

  And Hollis did work hard, even if, by casual oral transmission, his account soon provided the field office’s staff with its nom de guerre for Charles, which was of course “The Sheriff.”

  The younger men adored him. Rumors of his proficiency and victories filled the air. Someone dug out an account of his famous 1923 bank shoot-out in Blue Eye, someone used a connection to get his service record out of the War Department and learned from that that not only had he served eighteen months in our army, emerging as a highly decorated major, but before he’d spent two years in the Canadian army in the trenches, and, besides, a chestful of medals won a battlefield commission there too; suddenly he was the warrior king that all these young men knew they would never be. And the fact that he didn’t woo them made him all the more alluring; and that he didn’t recognize or pay heed to his reputation and never mentioned it himself, added to his mystique, as did his severe appearance, in his dark three-piece and low-brimmed brown fedora and the new .45 he carried in his shoulder rig, where all the others had chosen the lighter, less recoil-intense .38.

  “If it don’t start with a 4, I ain’t interested,” he said—much quoted in office lore—when choosing a weapon, and picking the one he did after diddling with all of them, testing for trigger pull, tightness of slide to frame, and some indefinable something he called feel—how could manufactured items such as pistol frames have different feels? they wondered—all these un-self-conscious signifiers conferred upon him a status he had not sought and did not welcome.

  First order of business: his long memo to Purvis, carbon to Cowley, on law enforcement firearm training, which argued persuasively, as opposed to successfully, for the elimination of the box concept of the shooting range in favor of a more fluid setup that would emphasize moving in and among targets, shooting on the move and from different angles and positions, snap-shooting against a clock to gauge time, caliber selection (the famous 4 again, as in .45 ACP or .44 Special or .45 Long Colt), reload and clearance drills (mandatory!), dry-fire, dry-fire, dry-fire, and basic first-echelon maintenance skills, not for gunsmithing but for field-expedient emergency clearances. He preached total flexibility, in other words, after the model of a real gunfight as fought by a real gunfighter. Then there was the issue of sighted fire, which he believed in, versus the Division mantra, “the crouch,” which mandated that the agents dip into a position where they were bent forward, the pistol itself thrust forward and down, then tipped up. The Division relied on muscle memory to get the gun on target, and Charles knew that some men have much better muscle memory than others—his own was superb—whereas all had eyes to align sights.

  This document was greeted with enthusiasm by Purvis, praised, and a copy put on the bulletin board. It was bucked to Washington, where at least two, and possibly as many as three, people read it to conclusion, but one of them was not the Director and so as an enterprise it was doomed from the start.

  Then he spent a long Saturday with Hollis in the arms room, examining each of the office’s weapons, looking for signs of wear, poor maintenance, bent or damaged sights, loose or stripped screws, burrs, over-lubrication or under-lubrication. He showed Hollis how to break each piece down, finding him an eager acolyte with some mechanical aptitude, and once he overcame his fear of the intricate, a skill equal to the cuckoo-clock guts of the Colt .38 revolver.

  He worked the long guns too and discovered why young Hollis had been point man on the Little Bohemia debacle. It was that he had a natural feel for the Thompson and had clearly spent much time with it, knowing how to break it down already, how to sight it, what the proper firing position was, and was adroit at fast reloads, a crucial battle skill. Charles guessed that he shot it quite well. Thus, Clegg had placed him in the vanguard of the assault, even though he’d never been in a gunfight before, and thus it was him that had to make the half-second decision in the pitch dark whether to fire on three men getting into a car. His head charged with nonsense about the importance of the raid, the evil of the bandits, the one-in-a-million opportunity in front of th
e agents, what choice did he have but to fire? He’d fired, the whole thing had gone south, and, given the nature of large organizations, what rolls downhill rolled downhill on Hollis, while Purvis and Clegg stepped as far from the rolling as possible, not that they didn’t get splashed. But in all this, nobody seemed to notice only Hollis had hit his targets while everyone else had shot the holy bejesus out of the lodge and cabins and accomplished nothing but too many holes for tourists to gawk at for the next hundred years.

  The issue of the shooting range came up sooner rather than later because Charles forced it. The only range in the city was in the basement of the new Chicago Police Headquarters, on South State at 11th, not a few blocks away, but access to it was a tricky political issue. Trainees for CPF had it every fifth week, full-time, as they ran through their cycles. At all other times it was supposedly open for voluntary fire by all local and federal law enforcement personnel, though few took advantage of the facility. However, that did not stop the officer in charge, a Sergeant O’Malley, from going all Lord of the Manor on it, and turning it into a sort of boys club for fellows out of County Cork, who hung around, kibitzed, and clucked and gossiped but didn’t do much else except use it as a treehouse.

  “It’s the Chicago way,” said Purvis. “Those that have, keep. Those that don’t have, cooperate. Meaning: the Irish have, nobody else gets. O’Malley holds the cards, because he knows we’re the new boys, he hasn’t felt us out yet, he’s not sure if we’ll be around awhile or we’re just a flash in the pan. I could write letter after letter to Commissioner Allman, but they’d all get lost, and if I complained, my complaints would get lost. It’s a tough situation. And let me be frank, Sheriff: to prevail, I’d have to use a lot of juice, and I don’t have much juice since Little Bohemia. I’m sure Sam Cowley would tell you the same.”

  “I ain’t one for going from boss to boss,” said Charles, earning a smile from Purvis. “Would you mind if I took a crack at this O’Malley on my own? Unofficial-like?”

  “I don’t know what you have planned, Sheriff, and I’m not sure I want to. But go ahead. Just don’t get caught.”

  So Charles looked into it, then ambled over one afternoon all by his lonesome with a couple boxes of government-issue hardball in his suit pockets. It was a pleasant summer day in Chicago, with a cooling wind blowing in off the lake, and the eight-block walk took him straight down State, past the big department stores, under the roar of the elevated trains that formed the south side of the Loop, past a couple of burly houses, and finally to the new building, which looked like a brick set on its end. It was thirteen stories of rectitude, with a couple stories of fraudulent frill plastered on the bottom two stories to disguise the grim utility of the place. He came into the lobby and took an elevator down one story.

  Nothing new here. Just a shooting range behind a sign-in desk, the thumps and bangs of cops on remedial missions echoing beyond the soundproof walls. He showed his badge, was assigned a lane, stuffed his ears with cotton—a few others did so, but it was not required—and stepped into familiar damp cement darkness, the smell of burned powder, the litter of spent casings on the floor, and the long hallway of booths. He went to his assigned booth, fetched a target, and reeled it out to twenty-five yards, which was the range’s ultimate challenge. He set his pistol down, removed the three loaded magazines he carried on his belt, placed the two GI boxes on the shelf before him. It was one of those absurd silhouettes where the guy just stands there, all in black to show up better in the raw light of the range, in a kind of rigid please-kill-me posture. It had nothing to do with gunfights.

  This was his first time with the new Colt Commercial he had signed out of the inventory. It felt like all the other Colts he’d fired, and it was nice and tight, with no wobble to the slide as they sometimes had, with a dull shine slightly incandescent in the bright light. He fired one-handed, off the ninety-degree orientation to the target that was the consensus style of police gunwork, because he didn’t want to showboat.

  In short order he had blown the black centers out of the silhouettes. The pistol shot well enough, though when he had time, he’d like to take a file to it, knowing all manner of little tricks that could be applied to Mr. Browning’s geometry within the frame to make a good pistol into a superb one. He left twenty-nine rounds in the second box and carefully threaded seven apiece into his three carry mags and the mag that went in the pistol. That one he placed in the pistol, jacked a round into the chamber, applied the safety, removed the magazine and replaced the round with the one left over, and slammed it into the gun, for an eight-round combat load on the first draw-and-shoot. He slid the cocked and locked pistol back in its elaborately carved holster tight under his left arm, turned and discovered that his shooting had drawn an audience. At least ten cops stood well back, clearly astonished at the marksmanship, the likes of which had been rarely seen down here.

  “Gents,” he said, nodding as he eased through the crowd, and they parted easily to let him through.

  Outside, the patrolman clerk told him the sarge would like to see him and gestured him toward a nubby little office off to one side.

  —

  “PRETTY GOOD SHOOTING, I HEAR,” said O’Malley, whose face appeared evolved from a large shoulder of beef, and his body from other large aspects of the bovine species. His blue tunic was tight and all the brass gizmos well shined. Hair parted in the middle and well brilliantined, he was a dapper addition to the world, looking every square inch—and there were many of them—the proper Irish cop. “Word’s got around, we have a real serious marksman on the range. You’ll always be welcome here, federal man.” He gestured for Charles to sit.

  “Thanks, Sergeant. I have fired a pistol a time or two in my time.”

  “I hear some man killing was involved.”

  “The war of course. Seemed such a waste of life, even German, but you have to hit them before they hit you. Then, on duty, had to face some armed boys, and my skill at marksmanship got me through the day. The truth is—and I’d only admit this to a man in blue—I sort of like it.”

  “We all do, Sheriff. Though I’d admit that only to a man with a badge himself. Anyhow, I wanted to say hello, welcome to the gunman, and make it clear you’re always welcome here. Maybe my own fellas can pick something up from him?”

  “I’d be happy if that happened,” said Charles. “But now that we’re here alone, Sergeant O’Malley, I’d like to be square with you on another issue. Do you mind?”

  “Not at all,” said O’Malley.

  “I’m hoping to bring my boys over in a nice orderly fashion,” said Charles, “and see if I can’t lick some sense into them so the kind of nonsense that took place at Little Bohemia won’t never happen again. I want the best gunfighters in the city.”

  “Ah, now,” said O’Malley, “isn’t that commendable? Pass on the knowledge, get all those lawyers and accountants up to snuff on the shoot-to-kill issues their fine and proper educations may have not offered them.”

  “That’s it,” said Charles.

  “Oh. But, see, there’d be a problem. We don’t like to commit the range to no outsiders on a regular basis. If Commissioner Allman is showing his various official visitors the department, he likes to let me know in advance and I scare up some boys in blue so that when the commissioner comes down, all the lanes are full and everybody’s banging away. We even dig out some Tommies, so it looks like our own are always on it, the very model of modern police training. It makes the commissioner happy. And if the commissioner’s happy, I’m happy.”

  “So I can’t get no two afternoons a week out of it? Only individuals can come over here and shoot?”

  “The sheriff can shoot anytime he wants, as his reputation as righteous officer of the law is well known and to be respected. The others, I’m afraid it ain’t possible. They can come, and if we have the room, it’s onto the range they go. But that’s all. That’s just the way it is ar
ound here, Sheriff, sorry to say.”

  “I suppose I could make a donation to some Hibernian Lodge of your specification and that might ease the crowding issue?”

  “Why, ain’t that a nice thing to say! I do like a man with a charitable inclination. It certainly might help your cause. You do catch on fast.”

  “Don’t let the drawl fool you. I might actually know a thing or two.”

  “I like a man who understands without being told.”

  “The problem is, we are low-budget and don’t have the petty cash to put into the party fund of St. Mary’s FOP District 1.”

  “Well, Sheriff, see the thing is, much as I am liking and respecting you, I’d have to advise you that’s your problem, it ain’t mine.”

  “Would you consider this one of your problems: a certain Italian gentleman named Lucente Barrio, also known as Lucky Bananas, was seen visiting the offices of FOP District 1 last Tuesday, where it’s rumored he makes a weekly contribution. However, since FOP District 1 is a public entity, under federal license as a charity, its financial records are on file. I done looked at ’em. Your outfit claims donations of under fifteen thousand dollars a year. Now, if Treasury were to pick up Lucky Bananas and he were offered ten years in prison against testifying how much he actually contributed, and if that money went unreported—not taxed, mind you, as a charity is not required to pay taxes on contributions, but it sure as hell has to report ’em—Treasury could close FOP District 1 down in a week. Under federal, not Illinois, statute. Treasury is hot these days because of putting Big Al away. That would be a problem for you, wouldn’t it, Sergeant O’Malley? And that house you’re building in Petoskey, where the fishing is fine and the water clear, maybe there wouldn’t be enough left in the kitty to pay off that mortgage.”

  “You bastard,” said O’Malley.

  “Ain’t no bastard at all,” said Charles. “Just introducing my friends in the Chicago PD to the Arkansas way.”