“Don’t talk like that,” I says.
“Why not? It’s true.” The sky above us was white and full of rain.
I reckoned we’d have a muddy splash of it between Aurora and Chicago (Johnnie had decided we should go back there because the Feds would be expecting us in St. Paul). Somewhere crows was calling. The only other sound was the ticktock of the cooling engine. I kept looking into the mirror at the wrapped-up body in the backseat.
I could see the bumps of elbows and knees, the fine red spatters where he’d bent over, coughing and laughing, at the end.
“Look at this, Homer,” Johnnie says, and points to the .38, which was tucked back in his belt. Then he twiddled Mr. Francis’s key ring with the tips of his fingers, where the prints were growing back in 115
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spite of all his trouble. There were four or five keys on the ring besides the one to the Ford. And that lucky rabbit’s foot. “Butt of the gun hit this when it come down,” he says. He nodded his head. “Hit my very own lucky piece. And now my luck’s gone. Help me with him.”
We lugged Jack to the gravel slope. Then Johnnie got the bottle of lye. It had a big brown skull and crossbones on the label.
Johnnie knelt down and pulled the sheet back. “Get his rings,” he says, and I pulled them off. Johnnie put them in his pocket. We ended up getting forty-five dollars for them in Calumet City, although Johnnie swore up and down that the little one had a real diamond in it.
“Now hold out his hands.”
I did, and Johnnie poured a cap of lye over the tip of each finger. That was one set of prints wasn’t ever going to come back. Then he leaned over Jack’s face and kissed him on the forehead. “I hate to do this, Red, but I know you’d do the same to me if it’d gone the other way.”
He then poured the lye over Jack’s cheeks and mouth and brow. It hissed and bubbled and turned white. When it started to eat through his closed eyelids, I turned away. And of course none of it done no good; the body was found by a farmer after a load of gravel.
A pack of dogs had knocked away most of the stones we covered him with and were eating what was left of his hands and face. As for the rest of him, there were enough scars for the cops to I.D. him as Jack Hamilton.
It was the end of Johnnie’s luck, all right. Every move he made after that—right up to the night Purvis and his badge-carrying gunsels got him at the Biograph—was a bad one. Could he have just thrown up his hands that night and surrendered? I’d have to say no.
Purvis meant to have him dead one way or the other. That’s why the Gees never told the Chicago cops Johnnie was in town.
I’ll never forget the way Jack laughed when I brought them flies in on their strings. He was a good fellow. They all were, mostly—good fellows who got into the wrong line of work. And Johnnie was the best of the bunch. No man ever had a truer friend. We robbed one more bank together, the Merchants National in South Bend, Indiana. Lester Nel-116
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son joined us on that caper. Getting out of town, it seemed like every hick in Indiana was throwing lead at us, and we still got away. But for what? We’d been expecting more than a hundred grand, enough to move to Mexico and live like kings. We ended up with a lousy twenty thousand, most of it in dimes and dirty dollar bills.
God makes it all come right in the end, that’s what Johnnie told Dock Barker just before we parted company. I was raised a Christian—
I admit I fell away a bit along my journey—and I believe that: we’re stuck with what we have, but that’s all right; in God’s eyes, none of us are really much more than flies on strings and all that matters is how much sunshine you can spread along the way. The last time I seen Johnnie Dillinger was in Chicago, and he was laughing at something I said. That’s good enough for me.
As a kid, I was fascinated by tales of the Depression-era outlaws, an interest that probably peaked with Arthur Penn’s remarkable Bonnie and Clyde. In the spring of 2000, I re-read John Toland’s history of that era, The Dillinger Days, and was particularly taken by his story about how Dillinger’s sidekick, Homer Van Meter, taught himself how to rope flies in Pendleton Reformatory. Jack “Red” Hamilton’s lingering death is a documented fact; my story of what happened in Dock Barker’s hideout is, of course, pure imagination . . . or myth, if you like that word better; I do.
117
In the Deathroom
It was a deathroom. Fletcher knew it for what it was as soon as the door opened. The floor was gray industrial tile. The walls were dis-colored white stone, marked here and there with darker patches that might have been blood—certainly blood had been spilled in this room. The overhead lights were cupped in wire cages. Halfway across the room stood a long wooden table with three people seated behind it. Before the table was an empty chair, waiting for Fletcher.
Beside the chair stood a small wheeled trolley. The object on it had been draped with a piece of cloth, as a sculptor might cover his work-in-progress between sessions.
Fletcher was half-led, half-dragged toward the chair which had been placed for him. He reeled in the guard’s grip and let himself reel.
If he looked more dazed than he really was, more shocked and unthinking, that was fine. He thought his chances of ever leaving this basement room in the Ministry of Information were perhaps one or two in thirty, and perhaps that was optimistic. Whatever they were, he had no intention of thinning them further by looking even halfway alert. His swelled eye, puffy nose, and broken lower lip might help in this regard; so might the crust of blood, like a dark red goatee, around his mouth. One thing Fletcher knew for sure: if he did leave, the others—the guard and the three sitting in tribunal behind the table—would be dead. He was a newspaper reporter and had never killed anything much larger than a hornet, but if he had to kill to escape this room, he would. He thought of his sister, on her retreat.
He thought of his sister swimming in a river with a Spanish name. He thought of the light on the water at noon, moving river light too 119
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bright to look at. They reached the chair in front of the table. The guard pushed him into it so hard that Fletcher almost tipped himself over.
“Careful now, that’s not the way, no accidents,” said one of the men behind the table. It was Escobar. He spoke to the guard in Spanish.
To Escobar’s left sat the other man. To Escobar’s right sat a woman of about sixty. The woman and the other man were thin. Escobar was fat and as greasy as a cheap candle. He looked like a movie Mexican. You expected him to say, “Batches? Batches? We don’t need no steenkin batches.” Yet this was the Chief Minister of Information. Sometimes he gave the English-language portion of the weather on the city television station. When he did this he invariably got fan mail. In a suit he didn’t look greasy, just roly-poly. Fletcher knew all this. He had done three or four stories on Escobar. He was colorful. He was also, according to rumor, an enthusiastic torturer. A Central American Himmler, Fletcher thought, and was amazed to discover that one’s sense of humor—rudimentary, granted—could function this far into a state of terror.
“Handcuffs?” the guard asked, also in Spanish, and held up a pair of the plastic kind. Fletcher tried to keep his look of dazed incom-prehension. If they cuffed him, it was over. He could forget about one chance in thirty, or one in three hundred.
Escobar turned briefly to the woman on his right. Her face was very dark, her hair black with startling white streaks. It flowed back and up from her forehead as if blown by a gale-force wind. The look of her hair reminded Fletcher of Elsa Lanchester in Bride of Frankenstein. He gripped this similarity with a fierceness that was close to panic, the way he gripped the thought of bright light on the river, or his sister laughing with her friends as they walked to the water. He wanted images, not ideas. Images were luxury items now. And ideas were no good in a place like this. In a place like this all you got were the wrong ideas.