Dead Men's Boots (21 page)

Either way, she beat Poulson to death with thoroughness and enthusiasm, and she stole his car. But before she left, she heated
up the cigarette lighter and used it to burn the dead man on his cheek as though she were a rancher branding a steer. Every
man she killed would be burned in a similar way, usually—once she took up smoking—with the lit end of a Padre Gigli cheroot.
In the last year or so before her death, she would come to be known in the Chicago underworld as the Hot Tomato. This was
partly a tribute to her physical charms, but it was also a wry reference to the fact that if you picked her up, you were likely
to get burned.

Arriving in Chicago, she ditched Poulson’s car and hit the streets—literally. She worked as a hooker for a couple of years
on the meat markets of South State Street, working briefly for a pimp named Lauder Capp before going solo (Capp was supposed
to have sworn to cut her throat for her disloyalty). She met Jackie Cerone at the Red Feather Club and took him up to a room
in a hotel probably not much different from the Paragon for a night of passion that turned into a new job opportunity.

She knew who Cerone was. She’d seen his picture in the papers, and she made the connection. This man who was hiring her for
the whole night was a big player in the Outfit, currently riding high after Sam Giancana had made his run for the border,
leaving Battaglia (with Cerone as kingmaker) to pick up the pieces of the Chicago rackets.

Kale’s relationship with Cerone was the turning point in her life, according to Sumner. She impressed him with her get-up-and-go
and her entrepreneurial spirit, and after two more paying dates, he employed her in a different capacity—as the bait for a
surviving Giancana lieutenant who was high up on his shit list.

There was a photo of her from around this time, and I had the vague feeling I’d seen it before. A smeary black-and-white image
taken in a crowded nightclub, it showed Kale dangling on Jackie Cerone’s arm, both of them mugging for the camera with bottles
of champagne in their mitts. Kale’s mouth was open on a laugh that looked like it must have been loud and indelicate, but
her eyes weren’t closed or crinkled with laugh lines; they were wide and staring. They looked to me like the eyes of a wild
animal peering out at the world from behind the thickets of her own face, where she was either hiding or looking for prey.
The only other figure in the picture, a blond man whose bodybuilder’s physique was encased in a double-breasted jacket that
screamed “gangster,” was staring at her with a sort of covetous wonder.

Before long, Sumner assured his readers, this real-life femme fatale was undertaking hits on her own. Jackie provided the
gun and the training in how to use it. Over the next five years, Kale became something of a celebrity in Mob circles without
ever coming to the attention of the police. She made at least nine hits (Sumner argued passionately for the higher and more
headline-grabbing score of thirteen) and was paid sums of up to eighty thousand dollars a time. At one point, Phil Alderisio
reputedly kept her on retainer.

Meanwhile, the cigarette-burn motif had become a tabloid legend, and incorruptible police chief Art Bilek made a public commitment
to bring in “the Mob killer who signs his work in this odious manner.” In 1968 he caught up with her in yet another hotel
room, on the top floor of the Salisbury. The trappings this time were opulent rather than sleazy, and Kale was a guest of
Tony Accardo, but neither the exclusive surroundings nor the distinguished patronage saved her when Bilek’s men surrounded
the building and moved in to arrest her.

She added another man to her score as the cops broke down the doors of the suite and burst in on her. She was stark naked,
according to the papers—fresh out of the bath, manicured and smelling of Madame Rochas, she shot the first man to walk through
the door, twenty-two-year-old constable Dermot Callister. Hit in the face, he died instantly. She herself was shot seven times
within the next few seconds (the bullets were later removed, counted, inventoried, stolen, and sold for souvenirs), but she
managed to wound three more officers before being taken alive. Her will to live must have been truly extraordinary, Sumner
pointed out, because one of those bullets hit her liver, and another collapsed her left lung. It was a miracle she survived
long enough to go to court; long enough to spend three years on death row; long enough to die, at last, at a time and place
of the state’s choosing.

That was the rough outline of the story, but Sumner embellished it with some fairly elaborate reconstructions of Kale’s sexual
encounters with the made men of the Chicago Mob scene. I wondered what his sources were for some of the more circumstantial
accounts. Maybe Kale kept a journal or something. “Dear Diary, you’ll never guess with which widely feared psychotic gang
lord I had a knee-trembler in the lift at Nordstrom’s today—or what he likes to be tickled with.”

I was only skimming, but even so, my attention was starting to wander long before I got to the end. It’s not that I’m prudish,
or even morally fibrous, but pornography that’s written as a list of sexual positions and uses the word “turgid” as though
it were punctuation gets old fairly quickly.

I skipped to the end, which turned out to be an account of Myriam Kale’s last two hits—the ones she was supposed to have carried
out from beyond the grave. In 1980 a guy who lived on George Street in Edinburgh was murdered in his own bathroom. Forensic
evidence suggested that he’d been murdered immediately after sex, and his cheek and temple were scarred by postmortem cigarette
burns.

Ditto in 1993. Some middle-aged sales rep in Newcastle left work on a Friday night, announcing his intention to “get laid,
get wrecked, and get to bed early.” He was found the next day in the laundry room of a hotel on Callerton Lane, stuffed into
one of the baskets. Again, his face had been burned, and again, there was evidence that he’d been engaging in coitus before
meeting his violent death.

Cause of death in both cases was blunt-instrument trauma, and the weapons were never recovered. Sumner offered no explanation
as to why Kale should have chosen the British Isles as the site of her postmortem adventures. He just presented the facts,
humbly and pruriently, for our consideration.

For a change of pace, I dug out the bag of bits and pieces that Carla had retrieved from behind John’s desk drawer. I flipped
through the pages of the
A to Z
again, this time with my own oversize hardcover London street guide beside me on the bed, and got slightly more out of it
this time. The list of place-names—Abney Park, Eastcote Lane, St. Andrew’s Old, St. Andrew’s Gardens, Strayfield, and the
rest—turned out to be a list of London cemeteries. A pretty exhaustive list, I was guessing, because it ran to more than a
hundred sites. Most had either been struck through with a single line or had a large cross next to them. Whatever John had
been looking for, he had exacting standards.

At the bottom of the page, set off from the list by a couple of inches of glaringly empty space, was a single word:
SMASHNA.
It wasn’t crossed out, but John had circled it again and again in red ink. He’d then added three question marks in green.
It was a powerful graphic statement; it just didn’t mean a damn thing to me.

The other lists—the ones that consisted of people’s names—were even more opaque. I checked through initial letters, last letters,
and a bunch of other assorted things to see whether some kind of acrostic message was hiding in there, but they were still
only names. Some friends, some the opposite of friends, most strangers.

That left the key and the matchbook. I picked up the matchbook and looked at that number again, and this time, maybe because
I was coming to it in a code-breaking frame of mind, the truth hit me at once. The final digits were 76970. That could be
a phone number after all, if the phone were a mobile and the number had been written backward.

I keyed the number into my mobile and it rang. I had a brief sense of something like vertigo: a peek down the sheer vertical
colonnades of a mind under terrible stress. Whom had John been keeping secrets from? What had made him so obsessively careful?
Nicky Heath, who ought to know, once told me that paranoia was a survival trait as well as a clinical condition. It hadn’t
been that for John, but it looked as though he’d done all he could to keep what he was working on from falling into the wrong
hands. Or any hands at all.

The ring tone sounded three times, then someone picked up.

“Hello?” A man’s voice, brisk and cheerful. “What’s the score?”

“Hi,” I said. “I’m a friend of John Gittings—”

There was a muttered “Fuck!” and the line went dead with a very abrupt click. Interesting. I tried again, and this time the
phone rang six, seven, eight times before it was picked up. No voice at all this time, only an expectant silence.

“I really am a friend of John’s,” I said, trying to sound calm and reassuring and radiantly trustworthy. “My name is Felix
Castor. I worked with John on a couple of jobs a little while back. His widow, Carla, gave me some of his things, and your
number was in there. I called because I’m trying to find out what he was working on before he died.”

That was enough to be going on, I thought. I waited for the line to go dead again. Instead, the same male voice said, “Why?”
Not so cheerful now—tense, with an underlying tone of challenge.

Actually, I had to admit it was a pretty good question. “Because he seemed to think it was something really important,” I
said slowly, because I was picking my words with care in case any of them turned out to be loaded. “But he didn’t tell anybody
what it was all about. I’m thinking that maybe finishing the job for him might make him rest easier. Because right now he’s
not resting easy at all.”

There was a long, strained silence.

“Not tonight,” the man said at last. “Tomorrow. Twelve o’clock. The usual place.”

He hung up before I could ask the obvious question, and this time when I dialed, the phone rang until I got voice mail. I
tried twice more with the same results. For some reason—maybe creeping paranoia—I didn’t want to leave a message. But I thought
I knew where the usual place had to be. There was presumably a reason why John had written this number down on the matchbook
from the Reflections Café Bar, and fortunately, he’d left the postcode showing when he tore off the cover. That plus the Yellow
Pages ought to be enough to get me there. The timing was going to be tight, though. I needed to be back at the courthouse
in Barnet at two p.m. for the start of the afternoon session, when Rafi’s hearing would resume.

I’d have to make sure the meeting was a short one.

    
Ten

A
HUNDRED AND FIFTY YEARS AGO, HM PRISON PENTON-ville was considered a model of the perfect nick. Politicians made millenarian
speeches about it; penal experts came from all over Europe to see it and coo over it; and no doubt many an old lag committed
imaginative new crimes so he could get banged up in it.

It was the first prison in England built to an American blueprint known as the separate system. It was sort of a refinement
of the Victorian panopticons, where sneaky little architectural tweaks and twiddles allowed the prisoners to be watched every
second of every day, no matter where they went.

In the separate system, though, the cruelty was a bit more refined than that. The designers still made a big deal out of having
clear lines of sight and high-mounted guard platforms, but the main inspiration was to knock the fight out of the prisoners
by denying them any human contact. Not only was the prison split up into a sprawl of different wings that had no contact with
one another, but the same separation was enforced at meals, in chapel, even in the exercise yard. Inside, cubicle walls divided
every shared space into a honeycomb of miniature rooms, so you were always alone even when there were a thousand people sitting
or standing right next to you. Outside, you wore a specially designed cap with a downward-extended peak to hide your face,
and nobody ever used your real name. As with Jean Valjean or Patrick McGoohan, your number became your official identity.
If you failed to answer to your number, you got a week in a punishment cell. If you gave your name to another prisoner, you
got another year nailed onto your sentence.

It was a roaring success in terms of making the prisoners docile. After a few months of this treatment, most of them were
as meek as lobotomized lambs. Okay, a few of them—maybe more than a few—would slip a little further along the bell-shaped
curve from passivity into apathy, then into psychotic withdrawal or catatonia, but some people are never going to be happy
no matter how much you do for them.

After a high-profile lawsuit brought by the family of a guy named William Ball, who went into Pentonville sane and came out
a frothing berserker, they started to liberalize the regime, and the whole idea of control by dehumanization went into a bit
of a decline in the UK until they opened Belmarsh in 1991. Pentonville’s not that bad today, if you compare it to somewhere
like Brixton or the Scrubs. It’s even got its own poolroom and a big bare hall where you can show movies, and its blindingly
whitewashed frontage is so meticulously maintained that it causes regular pileups when drivers coming along the Caledonian
Road incautiously glance across at it as the sun breaks out of cloud cover.