The Many Deaths of the Firefly Brothers (17 page)

After he took his first sip, Marriner lowered his voice. “What happened
to the money? Washing problems?”
“Yes, sort of. I don’t want to go into it.” Jason shifted in
his seat. “Bottom line is that we’re cash-low. We’re doing an
endeavor, and we have it all planned. We need you and at least two other
guys.”
“What about the guys you been with lately?”
“As you probably know from reading the papers, they’ve developed
the bad habit of being arrested, or dying. The ones who are alive have already
disappeared, if they’re smart.”
“You aren’t doing such a swell job of selling me on this.”
The waitress returned and slid plates before them, the
eggs shiny, the ham thin, the toast damp with butter. Even thin pig smelled
delicious, and Jason saw the way Marriner looked at his own plate.
“I’m betting that your impressive devotion to the ice-cube task is
beginning to drain on your resources. Don’t tell me you couldn’t
use this.”
Marriner liberally salted his food. “I didn’t say that. And yes, I
know of a couple guys could be helpful.”
“They ever done an endeavor before?”
“No. But they’re eager, and smart enough.” He took a bite.
“You seem awfully sure I want to do this.”
Jason cut into his ham. Since his awakening, food did not necessarily taste
better than it had before, but ham was still ham, which was something you did
not take for granted. “I know how much fun I am to be around.”
“Your brother more than makes up for that. That why you made him wait in
the car?”
“One of many reasons.”
“Why do you even need to do an endeavor? What about that heiress of
yours?”
He put his fork down and spoke with barely contained fury. “I’m not
with her for some payout, goddamnit, I’m with her because I’m with
her.”
Jason was surprised by his own outburst. He was worried about Darcy.
“So,” the old man asked after a pause, “when are you
thinking?”
“Four days from now. We do two in one day.”
Finally, surprise registered on Marriner’s face.
“The heat’s vanished,” Jason explained. “But once they
realize we aren’t dead it’ll get uncomfortable again. We want to
take what we can, then disappear.”
Marriner finished his ham. Then he reached into his glass and his fingers
emerged with an ice cube. He held it as if he had excavated a priceless gem.
The air was thick and hot and the cube seemed to visibly diminish as tiny
rivulets ran down his wrist, wetting his sleeve.
“We all do, Jason. Most of us just aren’t as good at it as you
are.”

X.

T
heir numbers were dwindling, as if each
time one of the Public Enemies died so did ten reporters. But there were still
enough of them camped out in the hallway between the elevator and the office
door to make Cary Delaney’s arrival at work—not to mention trips to
the bathroom—exasperating.
The reporters shouted a few questions as he walked toward the door for the
Chicago field office of the Department of Justice’s Bureau of
Investigation. Queries about the various remnants of the now-headless Dillinger
and Firefly Gangs were tossed out, and Cary’s expression was stoic until
one threw him.
“The Firefly Brothers were spotted in Cleveland
yesterday—what’s the Bureau’s take?”
Cary rolled his eyes and cracked a grin. “We only arrest live
criminals—dead ones are beyond our jurisdiction. Cathedral’s two
blocks south if you want to get their take on it.” Then he opened the
door.
Cary nodded hello to the secretary and found his place with the rest of the
agents in the bullpen, a room consisting of desks so crushed together that it
looked as if it had once been a much larger room until the walls had closed in
by twenty feet. Off the bullpen were doors leading to the impenetrable file
room, which no one but the secretary was allowed in; a conference room, also
used for particularly delicate phone calls or interrogations;
and one decent office for the SAC, the special agent in
charge. The headquarters were on the twentieth floor of the Bankers Building,
in the financial district, a block away from the Chicago Federal Reserve, which
had been robbed a year earlier by the Barker Gang in a speedy, silent, but
nonetheless botched job: the five bags the crew made off with were actually
filled with mail, not cash. The Barkers had crashed their armored Hudson a few
blocks away, killing two flatfoots as they switched cars. Cary often wondered
how many sad stories or checks or money orders had disappeared in those
mailbags, which the escaped crooks likely burned.
This morning it was hot, again. The windows were all along the same wall, and
fresh air refused to enter the workspace, as if it had been warned off by an
armed guard.
“The Firesons were seen driving through Lincoln City yesterday
morning,” said the agent two desks over from Cary, his head obscured by
an open
Tribune
.
“There, too?” Cary smirked. “I was told Cleveland. Those are
some busy corpses.”
For weeks Cary had rotated between the Bureau’s special Dillinger Squad
and its Fireson Squad, both of which were now focused on apprehending the dead
men’s few at-large associates. Most were small-time in comparison with
their fallen ringleaders, troglodyte misfits who eluded capture only because
they likely hid away in tiny apartments or abandoned farmhouses, where they
would remain until they grew too hungry or bored. The highest-profile Public
Enemies still breathing were Baby Face Nelson and Brickbat Sanders: diminutive,
hot-tempered gunmen from the Dillinger and Firefly Gangs, respectively. Cary
was following up on various leads, reading wire reports, and calling many an
overexcited small-town cop who insisted that the petty thief sitting in his
dusty jail was in fact a notorious outlaw. There were days Cary never left the
office.
Which was perfectly fine with him. Cary Delaney was not a police officer, after
all; he was an agent of the Bureau of Investigation. Although the two
occupations were becoming more similar, that certainly had not been the case
two years ago, when Cary joined the Bureau fresh out of Georgetown Law. He had
hoped to procure a job at a prominent firm, but the depression was in
full-throated howl when his graduation date arrived.
Many
of his silver-spoon classmates had appointments lined up, of course—their
places had been secured the moment their mothers mailed their gilded birth
announcements—but to a scholarship boy like Cary life came free of
guarantees. He had decided to stay in Washington and look for a government job,
something that could pay for a roof over his head. What little he had known
about the Bureau of Investigation made it seem like any other legal-research
office, with just a splash of intrigue due to its focus on crime.
How things had changed in two years. He had started by investigating interstate
auto-theft cases, looking into crimes of passion on Indian reservations, and
pursuing seditious rabble-rousers. When Cary joined the Bureau, agents
weren’t even allowed to carry firearms. But that unwritten law was reversed
after the Kansas City Massacre in June of ’33, when three police officers
and a federal agent were gunned down at K.C.’s Union Station while
escorting a bank robber to prison. Cary and his fellow agents had watched in
amazement as Mr. Hoover used that case to lobby for a strong federal police
force, nominating his Bureau for the job. This would be a War on Crime, the
Director declared, and suddenly Cary and his stunned colleagues were thrust
into the role of upholding civic order, restoring public faith in a strong
central government, and chasing down vicious, homicidal maniacs.
The Bureau had suffered many embarrassments in Cary’s time: suspects
walking away from stakeouts; dreadful performances in shootouts; and, worst of
all, the disaster at Little Bohemia. The Bureau had cornered Dillinger, Nelson,
and others in a small lake resort in Wisconsin, surrounding the building, only
to discover, after the passage of a frigid night, that the criminals had
escaped hours ago via an unknown path along the frozen beach—and had
managed to kill an agent along the way. Mr. Hoover’s prized young Ivy
Leaguers were out of their league, and only when he began recruiting more
“cowboys,” as he called them—toughened cops from the
Southwest—did the successes mount: Machine Gun Kelly and his kidnapping
crew had been nabbed, Dillinger was ambushed, Clyde Barrow and his poet
girlfriend were gunned down along a rural Louisiana road, and now the Firefly
Brothers were dead. Suddenly every kid in America was reading comic books about
heroic G-men, and Mr. Hoover was consulting with Hollywood on forthcoming
pictures
about the Bureau. There was no end to the
ironic grumbling among the real, flesh-and-blood, overtired, underpaid,
caffeine-riddled, stakeout-sunburned agents.
There were always more leads for the agents to explore, but fewer now that the
Firesons were dead. That was the thing with death: it could leave the old
mysteries unsolved. The stories could go on telling themselves, altering with
the passage of time. And there were plenty of mysteries about the Firesons,
such as how they managed to get money to their relatives when the family was so
carefully watched, how they eluded so many ambushes. Most perplexing was a
stakeout in which Cary had taken part. Two months ago the Chicago cops had
arrested a grifter who had laundered money for the Barker Gang, and upon
questioning he claimed he could cough up the Firefly Brothers. The launderer
said the Firesons were desperately trying to wash their score from the recent
Federal Reserve job in Milwaukee; he was to meet them three days later at a
restaurant in Toledo. The Bureau mobilized a huge squad, studying the
building’s floor plan and staking out men at every possible exit. At
eight o’clock on a rainy evening, Cary—who had been requisitioned
by the understaffed Cleveland field office—had sat in a closed deli
across the street from the restaurant when a taxi pulled up in front of the
building and deposited Jason Fireson, carrying a briefcase. There he was, a
living, breathing man entering the restaurant. His dark-gray fedora was turned
low and his lapels were pulled up, but Cary recognized the eyes. Smart and
watchful, and something else, indefinable. The SAC put out the curious order
not to storm the building until the second Fireson showed up: they would wait
as long as thirty minutes for Whit to appear. Two agents were already stationed
inside the restaurant. Time passed.
Cary’s heart had been loud in his chest—it was one of the few times
he had needed to wear his sidearm, in a shoulder holster beneath his jacket. He
had spent hours practicing with the thing, especially over the preceding few
weeks, as more and more agents suddenly had use for them. He tried not to think
about his mother back in Pennsylvania, and how panicked she had been since
realizing that her son’s job consisted of more than just poring over
legal books on the distinction between theft and grand larceny.
Time passed as the agents waited for Whit, but he didn’t show. The SAC
finally gave the order to signal the men inside and storm the building.
But the men inside couldn’t be signaled because the
curtains were drawn, which had not been the case when they’d studied the
place the previous evening. Still, storm the building they did. Inside they
found three or four tables’ worth of terrified customers raising their
hands as armed agents and cops ran in jagged lines in search of Jason Fireson.
In the men’s room they found the two agents who had supposedly been
watching him, unconscious and handcuffed to each other. The launderer, too, had
disappeared. The Bureau frisked and questioned every busboy, waiter, cook, and
customer while they searched for hidden nooks, looked beneath planks in the
attic, and combed through the cellar, opening boxes of pasta and crates of
onions. The agents outside swore that Fireson and the launderer hadn’t
left the building, but they weren’t inside, either. They had simply
vanished. The launderer turned up a week later in Joplin, but he wouldn’t
talk. How on earth Jason Fireson had escaped was something Cary had spent far
too much energy on. It couldn’t have happened, yet it did. Reporters
loved that story.
Earlier this month, right before their death, Cary himself had received the tip
he’d been waiting for: the Firesons had finally laundered their money and
were due to pay off their old partner, Owney Davis, at a restaurant in Detroit.
Again a building was surrounded, and surely past mistakes would not be
repeated. New ones were made instead: somehow the Firesons sniffed out the
trap, driving past the restaurant without stopping, speeding onto the highway,
and escaping after a short chase.
Still, they would meet their maker that night. Meaning that the mysteries of
those impossible escapes no longer mattered. Mythmakers could invent whatever
explanations they wished. Had the brothers really sent death threats to
President Roosevelt and half his cabinet? Who knows. Did they really operate a
pirate radio station based in the southern Midwest, broadcasting secret
intelligence to their legions of fellow hoodlums? Who cares. Was Jason really a
mystic who could pass through walls and read the thoughts of his pursuers? Cary
thought,
Let the people think what they want
.
He wasn’t surprised the press was now reporting on all the crazy Fireson
spottings—they’d done the same after Dillinger was killed. Like the
other agents, he laughed at the stories and did his best to focus on facts as
they searched for the remaining Public Enemies.
Still, the stories served as a good reminder that he should call the
Points North police and check on the recovery of the
missing bodies. After a two-minute delay, he was connected to an officer who
claimed that several leads were being pursued. The man’s explanations
withered under further questioning.
“Honestly, Agent Delaney,” the officer said, yawning, “we
don’t feel too good about our chances. They’re probably at some
freak sideshow in the Yucatán by now, in which case it’s kinder out of
our jurisdiction, y’know? We’d love to have those bodies back,
maybe do some more photo shoots if they haven’t gotten too decomposed
yet. But I doubt that whoever took ’em stuck around inside county lines.
So it’s a state job now, or maybe federal. You boys interested in taking
over the search party?”
Cary tried to imagine a more thankless task than tracking corpse thieves.
“I think we have other priorities at the moment, but thanks for the
offer.”
“Oh, that reminds me. Chief Mackinaw wanted me to ask you when we should
expect that reward check.”
Cary tapped his pencil on the desk. “Exactly three days after you find
those bodies.”
He hung up before the officer could object. He tried not to walk over to the
other agent’s desk and read the
Tribune
story about the Fireson
sightings, tried to focus on real facts. But he couldn’t resist. He
grabbed the paper and sped through the article, shaking his head at it all.
People believed the damnedest things.