I walked all the way to where Tunnel City proper ended and Tunnel City’s nourishing farmland began. Walking back to my hotel I knew why Marcella DeVries had had to get out–and why she had had to return.
I was strolling down Main Street looking for a place to eat when a man crossed the street toward me, coming from the direction of the hotel. He was a tall man in his forties, dressed in blue jeans and a checked sport shirt. There was something different about him, and when his gaze zeroed in on me I knew he wanted to talk.
When he hit the sidewalk he planted himself firmly in my path and stuck out a large bony hand for me to shake. I took it.
“I’m Will Berglund, Officer,” the man said.
“Fred Underhill, Mr. Bergiund, and I’m not a policeman, I’m an insurance investigator.”
“I don’t care. I knew Marcy DeVries better than anyone. I–” The man was obviously very moved.
“Where can we go to talk, Mr. Berglund?”
“I run the movie theater here in town.” He pointed down Main Street. “The last show is over at nine-forty-five. Meet me there then. We can talk in my office.”
When I walked into the lobby of the Badger Theater Will Berglund shooed the few remaining moviegoers out the door, locked it, and wordlessly led me to an upstairs office crowded with beatup theater seats and inoperative movie projectors. “I like to tinker,” he said by way of explanation.
I took a seat without being asked, and he took one across from me. My mind was jumping with questions that I never got the chance to ask–I didn’t need to. Berglund opened all the windows in the room for air and began to talk.
He talked without interruption for seven hours, his manner by turns plaintive, morose, but above all else tragically accepting. It was an intimate story, a panorama of small-town life, small-town talk, small-town hope, and small-town retribution. It was the story of Marcella DeVries.
They had been lovers from the very beginning, first in spirit, then in flesh.
The Berglund family had emigrated from Norway the same year as the DeVries family had left Holland. A network of Old Country friends and cousins secured work for the two families in the stockyards of Chicago.
It was 1906, and work was plentiful. The hardy Berglund men became foremen, the quicker-witted DeVnes men became master bookkeepers. The three Berglund brothers and Piet and Karl DeVries shared a dream common to immigrants–the dream of Old Country power, the dream of land.
All five men, then in their thirties, were impatient. They knew that the feudal power they so desperately desired could not be achieved by the attrition of begging, borrowing, scrimping, and slaughtering cattle with ten-pound sledgehammers. Time was not on their side, and history was not on their side. But brains and ruthlessness were, compounded by their Calvinist religious fervor, and the five men embarked on a career of crime, with only one goal in mind: the acquisition of twenty-five thousand dollars.
It took three years, and cost two lives, one from each family. The Berglunds and DeVrieses became burglars and armed robbers. Piet DeVries was the acknowledged leader and treasurer, Willem Berglund his adjutant. They were the planners, the shrewd overseers of impetuous Karl DeVries and the outright violent Hasse and Lars Berglund.
Piet was a romantic intellectual, and an ardent lover of Beethoven. He loved jewelry, and converted the cash gleaned from the gang’s burglaries into diamonds and rubies that he sold in turn for a small profit on the commodities exchange, always keeping a few small gems for himself. He longed to be a jewel thief–for the romance of it as well as for the profit–and he planned the strongarm theft of an elderly, jewel-bedecked Chicago matron known to attend the opera unescorted. His brother Karl and Lars Berglund were to do the job. It was 1909, and the money from the robbery would put them well over their twenty-five-thousand mark.
The woman traveled to and from her home on the near north side in a horse-drawn carriage. The men waited under the steps of her brownstone, armed with revolvers. When she pulled to the curb and her driver helped her up the stairs, Karl and Lars sprang from their hiding place, expecting to easily overpower their prey. The driver shot them both in the face at point-blank range with a custom-made six-shot Derringer.