Chicago Confidential полностью

He couldn’t believe it. Rocco just stood there with his red eyes and touched the red in the corner of his mouth and couldn’t believe it.

“You touch her again, you come near her again,” I told him, “I will kill you so fucking slow you’ll be begging me to finish you. I’ll shoot your toes off and let you bleed to death out your fuckin’ feet.”

Rocco didn’t know what to say. The skunk-haired gangster looked afraid; it did not seem to be a state he was terribly familiar with. People were, after all, supposed to be afraid of him.

“Rocky,” Charley said, gently, “you put the girl out on the street with her bags — you sent her away. If Nate wants to take up with her, that’s his business.”

Rocco looked at Charley in amazement, searching his brother’s face for some sign that these were just words meant to fool me. If he found that, I didn’t sense it.

Charley turned my way, his voice gentle, reasonable. “Nate — can Rocky go now? Could you and I speak, alone, for a few moments — just the two of us?”

I shrugged. “Sure. Rock, did you need to use the facilities before you leave? Maybe you want to throw some water on your face.”

Rocco’s upper lip curled back, like a Doberman about to growl — or attack.

“Go, Rock,” Charley said, and he took his brother’s arm and tugged him away from where he’d stood facing me. “Go sit at the table and enjoy Frankie and stay away from our friend, Mr. Heller here... and stay away from the girl.”

Rocco swallowed, nodded, and hurried out.

Charley, breathing hard, leaned against the sink counter. “Nate... Nate, are you insane? Aren’t you fucking aware my brother is a very violent man?”

“I’ll take those questions in order: yes I am insane; that’s how I got out of the Marines. And your brother is a violent man — almost as violent as I am, and much tougher with women than I’ll ever be.”

Charley was shaking. He reached a hand in his tux pocket and found the small round silver box, from which he selected two pink pills. He popped them in his mouth, and ran a faucet and stuck his face under the water and drank. Then he used a paper towel to dry his face and turned to me, his hazel eyes tight with apparent earnestness.

“Nate... I will handle my brother. I will make sure this unfortunate incident is a... one time thing... Just a sad falling out among old friends.”

“I’ll kill him if he touches her.”

“I know! I know... You made your point. What Rocco fails to understand is how... misguided he was in evicting Miss Payne.”

“Why is that? He was tired of her — she was nothing to him but a dog to whip.”

Charley drew in a long breath and let it out slowly. “This inquiry... with the potentially damaging publicity it could bring... Miss Payne might feel sufficiently alienated from my brother to do something unwise.”

“You mean, she lived in your penthouse for a long time, and saw people come and go, and probably heard things.”

He nodded, once, a kind of a sideways nod. “Now. If I... handle Rocco. Keep him away from her — and from you... will you see to it that Miss Payne does not become friendly with the senator from Tennessee and his little tea party?”

I considered that. Then I said, “You know, that seems fair.”

He sighed and beamed. “Good. Good... And thank you for helping my brother, my other brother out, with that Mortimer character.” He shook his head. “Such a lout. Such an uncouth lout.”

“Some people have poor social graces,” I said, holstering my nine millimeter.

Charley exited the men’s room, with me right behind him; no sign of Rocco. I think Charley was as relieved as I was. He turned to me and extended his hand.

“We have a deal, then?”

“Deal,” I said, shaking with him.

When Charley had headed back toward the showroom — where Sinatra was singing, “If I Loved You” — I glanced toward the ladies’ room door, and saw Jackie cracking it, peeking out.

“Come on, honey,” I said. “We’re missing the show.”

She rushed to my side, looped her arm in mine. “I saw Rocco come out! He didn’t see me, but I—”

“He’s not going to bother you, anymore.”

“What happened?”

“I didn’t kill him.”

And I couldn’t keep the disappointment out of my voice.

Washington, D.C. — the seat of political power in the western hemisphere — was also the hub of the mightiest industrial and military machine in the history of the world. The White House, the Capitol, various imposing monuments and a multitude of marble buildings swimming in seas of manicured green, were dignified symbols that imparted a stateliness, a nobility to the terrible powers certain men in this town possessed — men who charted the strategies and movements of armies and navies all over the world, who dispatched diplomats and spies to every corner of the earth, who controlled the man-made cataclysm of the atomic bomb.