“As you have demonstrated.” She smiled, encouraging him.
“The guys loved it. They’d call out the accent, and I’d give it to them. Yiddish, Philly, the Bronx, Boston. The ones I didn’t know, I learned. Soldiers were from everywhere. I’d get them talking, and I’d listen. My mother spoke Gaelic, so I had that in my arsenal when I needed it. I can pass as Greek too, so I learned Greek. I can speak Italian, Spanish, and Yiddish too.”
“You learned all of that in the army?” she gasped.
“Nah. The languages came before . . . and after. It’s part of my job.” His affinity for language was what had gotten him in the door, he had no doubt.
“In Cleveland, you’ll find Poles and Hungarians—more Hungarians than in any city except Budapest—and Czechs,” Dani said. “You’ll have to brush up on your eastern European languages.”
“I probably won’t be here that long,” he said.
A shadow flickered across Dani’s face, as if that bothered her. He liked that it did. And that bothered him.
“Do you really work for the Treasury Department?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“Are you really a . . . tax man?”
“No. Not . . . really. But kind of.”
“And you were a policeman.”
He nodded. “I didn’t mind military life. Didn’t mind taking orders. Didn’t mind fighting either, though I didn’t love it like some of the guys. When I got home, police work just made sense. I was already married. Had a family to support.”
“You must have been very young when you married.”
“I married Irene six months after I joined the army. We were both eighteen. We grew up together. Lived on the same street. When I went to France, she stayed with her parents. When I came home . . . I moved in too.” It felt odd to talk about it. In so many ways, he did not recognize the Michael Malone in his memories. It was as if he’d split in two or left himself behind in the old neighborhood, on the street where they’d lived. The street Irene had never left.
“We got married, and three days later I left for France for more than two years. When I got home in early 1919, Mary was almost eighteen months old,” he said. It’d been surreal, meeting his child for the first time, and what a lovely little girl she’d been. She’d had Irene’s blue eyes but none of her blondness. Mary was dark like him.
“It wasn’t just Mary that you lost. There was another little stone at the cemetery when you were burying Irene,” Dani said, almost apologetic, like she was confessing something she wished she didn’t have to.
“This was not the story I wanted to tell,” he murmured.
“I know.”
He didn’t want to tell it, but it was all connected. There would have been no Al Capone in his life without the army, without Irene and Mary and James, without . . . Dani. He supposed it was best to just lay it all out, which he did, quickly. Three deaths and the birth of the man he now was.
“Irene got pregnant again about a year after I came home from France. Everything was fine right up until the end. I don’t know what went wrong. But the baby—a boy—was stillborn. Then Mary died of pneumonia about a year and a half after that. Irene kinda broke. She was always a little high strung, but she just crashed. And she really never recovered. I made it worse, she said. I made her anxious and upset. We didn’t divorce . . . but we’ve lived apart for the last fifteen years.” That was very good. Very matter-of-fact. Unemotional. He was proud of himself. He didn’t even break eye contact with Dani. Of course, she had more questions.
“How did she die?”
“She liked the laudanum. It caught up with her, I guess. Or she mixed it with something. We don’t know if she did it on purpose. She was in her bed. Molly said it looked like she just died in her sleep.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I didn’t feel anything. I still don’t.” He shoved his hands into his pockets and met her gaze with resignation. He was not deserving of sympathy nor did he particularly need it.
“When a lake freezes over, it doesn’t freeze all the way to the bottom,” Dani said.
“What?”
“It just freezes on the surface. The ice can be really thick . . . but there’s always water moving below it. You feel something. It’s just below the ice,” she said softly.
“Yeah. Well.” He shrugged.
“How does all this lead to Al Capone?” she asked, allowing him to return to the original tale.
“This is where you come in.”
“Me?” she gasped.
“You. And your father.”
Her gaze was riveted to his face.
“Your father was running on routes that had already been claimed. It was early days yet, and everyone was trying to get their foot in the door. Claiming territory. Supply lines. Paying off cops and judges and funneling money to whoever they needed to look the other way.
“I don’t know if your dad was with O’Banion’s gang. With a name like Flanagan, probably. But Johnny Torrio—the boss before Capone—sent a message.”
“My father was the message?”
“Yeah. And the cops heard it loud and clear. Murder, suicide, case closed. I saw it over and over again. And there you were, a little girl with mismatched eyes who needed justice. And I knew you weren’t going to get it. Your mother wasn’t going to get it. And your dad, for all his mistakes, wasn’t going to get it either.”
“What did you do?” she whispered.
“I’d heard about the work the Treasury boys were doing. T-men, they called them. I thought maybe it was something I could do. I didn’t want to be one of the bad guys, and everywhere I looked there were bad guys, and nobody was stopping them. And I had nothing . . . better . . . to do.”
“Because your family was gone,” she summarized, her mouth sad.
He nodded, the movement terse. “Yeah. So I . . . signed up.”
“That easy?”
“No.” He laughed, though the action didn’t curve his lips. “It wasn’t easy. But I’m not going to break it all down for you either. Jump ahead to Capone in ’29.”
“All right.”
“The department needed an inside man.”