Mile High (28 page)

Edward collapsed. His breakdown could have been induced by the fear of losing her, the shock of her loss and his grief at now really having to live without her, but part of it was overwork and undernourishment. He was admitted to the hospital and he stayed there for thirty-two hours of amber and purple twilight while Willie handled the funeral arrangements.

Edward was aware of Willie sitting beside the bed with red eyes. Edward said, “It was Goff's child.”

Willie shook his head. “No, Eddie. I saw it. He's your child.”

Edward closed his eyes again and realized that all through the passing year while he thought he was punishing Irene he must have been punishing himself, and he could not understand it. It was as though he had been staring himself down in terrible judgment (of
what?
what terrible thing had he done beyond protecting his name and his hearth?). He would stay away from her for one year because that was right, she deserved that punishment. It would also give her time to savor the marriage she had almost thrown away. They could forgive and forget and he would take her back again in spite of everything she had done to him. But he saw his guilt in a flash. He had hurt her grievously, and he was using the full and formal year to help her, bit by bit, get over the loss of the house she had loved and perhaps slowly come to understand why he had to burn it down. Bit by bit he had been giving her time to forget those poisoned letters, to have the chance to come to yearn, as he had yearned, that they could go together again, so that everything could be the way it always was meant to be.

“Willie?”

“Yes, Eddie?”

“I want the best private detectives.”

“Why, Ed?”

“I want to know who sent Irene those letters.”

“Okay, Ed.”

“Now. Do it now. Get it started.”

“After the funeral.”

“Whose funeral?”

“Irene's.”

Edward began to weep.

Only Edward, Dan, Willie, Charles Pick, Jr., and old Marxie Heller attended the funeral. Edward and Dan rode together in the limousine behind the hearse. They had invited Willie to ride with them as a member of the family, but he had declined.

“What would you want to do now, Dan?”

“Stay with you.”

“But you have to go to school.”

“I can't go back to Florida.”

“Well—Gelbart.”

Dan nodded.

“We'll have the summers and all the holidays together. Just the way my father and I used to have, and we'll go anywhere you say. Would you like to meet a champion or have lunch with the cadets at West Point? Do you like the races or baseball games? Would you like to go to Europe? Whatever is the most fun, that's what we'll do.”

Edward threw himself into the work of reorganizing Horizons' affiliate concepts. He worked with Congressman Rei, who in turn worked with John Torrio. Rei called the meeting at the President Hotel on the boardwalk in Atlantic City for late April. It lasted three days and four nights. It was entirely successful. On the first day of the meeting Capone was told he was through, and he seemed relieved. He grinned at the news. “Game fish and fast ponies,” he said. “Florida for me.” He played it with class, like a board chairman stepping down for a younger man, but that night he went to Rei's suite and he was so frightened he was trembling. He could not believe that they had meant what they said, that he had not been marked for death. He was convinced that Congressman Rei was the
pezzinovanta
who had ordered his execution. In Rei's presence he pleaded with John Torrio to intercede for him, to convince Rei that he must be saved. He clung to Torrio's arm and begged for help.

To prove Al was mistaken, Rei said they would make any arrangement he wanted. Capone began to calm down. Torrio suggested that if he felt this way right now perhaps he would feel safer in Europe. Capone shook his head. “They're a bunch of foreigners to me, John. It was different for you. You like opera and you have your mother over there.”

“Look, Al,” Congressman Rei said. “We wish you well, like I keep saying. But I can see it might be good for you to cool yourself off, because, who knows, when the word gets out and some junky thinks you took a fall, he could take a shot at you in the first couple of months.”

“Jesus. I didn't think of that yet.”

“Look, Al. Pick a city. Any city in the country except, of course, Chicago. I'll arrange for you to take a pinch there and you can cool off in a big, comfortable cell, in a big, safe building where money counts for something.”

“Yeah?” He looked at John Torrio for confirmation.

“When you, personally, are satisfied, Al,” Torrio said, “when you can guarantee yourself that everything is copasetic, then you can go to Florida or do whatever you want.”

An important point that was decided at Atlantic City gave much of the impetus to the “Americanization” of the mobs that began immediately thereafter, truly coming out of the inspiration, with which everyone heartily agreed, that a slush fund should be established for the proper education of promising young people to give them a chance to learn business administration the scientific way, the way Congressman Rei had learned it at the Wharton School of Business of the University of Pennsylvania, so that they could assume their proper roles as executives in the new interlocking organization, to cope with the already complex and sophisticated industrial problems that had arisen.

It was agreed that in the meantime a lot of impossible old-timers, the real inflexible Mustache Petes, would have to be eliminated, because every day they were proving that they just didn't have the elasticity to keep up with the modern operation. Joe the Boss was knocked off. Frankie Marlowe, Frankie Yale, the whole Diamond gang, Fats Walsh, Monkey Schubert, Johnny Guistra, Carmelo Liconti, Gerardo Scarpato were all killed, Sam Pollaccio disappeared forever, and Salvatore Maranzano, leader of the most reactionary of the Mustache Petes, was murdered in his office on the twelfth floor of 230 Park Avenue by Bo Weinberg, actually Dutch Schultz's chief gunman, as a favor to Charley Lucky. They were the headliners. Across the United States on September 11, 1931, fifty-six Mustache Petes were executed, and the new administrative team to co-align all national interests of Horizons A.G. was selected by Congressman Rei, headed by Charley Lucky and Vito Genovese. Edward West was enormously pleased with the changes that Rei (and the original Atlantic City conference) had effected. He was now confident that the enterprise would prosper and expand to an even greater degree than ever before realized despite the fact that prohibition itself was doomed.

Since February Edward had been using women as an anodyne. He didn't drink. He had a revulsion for drugs. His nerves had been laid bare and he was haunted by wonderful memories of Irene and pursued by the need to find out who had sent those letters. He pressed on Willie hard and Willie in turn pressed on the agencies working on the investigation, but they were getting nowhere.

Rhonda Healey had set up a beautiful girl named Baby Tolliver in a flat on Park Avenue, staked her out with a colored maid, some furs and nice furniture, and kept her in spending money. Willie handled the bills. Edward saw other women at random too, but Baby Tolliver was programed in as a staple, two or three nights a week, dipping in out of nowhere, always after one in the morning, sometimes at five in the morning. As the summer went on he saw less of the girl because the market was at last showing signs of real weakness. He moved into the apartment in the bank building next to his office and ran out his guerilla lines for buying, selling, raiding and wrecking from there to eleven action stations on either side of the Atlantic, all aimed right back at New York and finally causing the ruinous sure trend that capsized the market. Meanwhile he manipulated to get the two billion four hundred million dollars of the swollen Horizons “special” fund out of the market on May 4, 1929, moving into the short position on September 5. However, on October 25, after the profit had been taken on every dollar he had taken out, something very bad happened that required him to leave the country. He had discovered that Baby Tolliver had been operating a house of prostitution in the luxurious home he had made for her, and he had gone berserk with resentment and frustration, and it was possible that he had hurt her badly. Also, although he had not known it had happened at the time, he had beaten up the colored maid. But that was adjustable and Willie adjusted it. But a beating wasn't enough for the girl after what he had done for her. Willie handled the police and the DA's office through and with John Kullers, and they nailed her on maintaining and operating and on charges of compulsory prostitution and attempted bribery. However, it was decided that it would be a better thing if Edward got out of town or out of the country, so he sailed for Europe with Willie on October 27, 1929, and told the horde of ship news reporters who had crowded into his stateroom that he was “seriously concerned with the immediate financial future of the country.”

Just before Christmas, Willie got full confirmation that the poison-pen letters which had been sent to Irene, almost shattering the West marriage, had been sent by agents of the Soviet government. The revelation was shocking, staggering, mind-tilting news to Edward: for its starkness alone, as well as for its gargantuan implications.

He could not believe the documentation that Willie laid out so nervously before him. The story was there however, and in fact undeniable. Willie explained with a shaking voice that after the detective agencies had found only dead ends, he had, on a hunch, veered to friends in the American labor movement—Louis “Lepke” Buchalter, for example. In time, and through Lepke's connections, he had come upon certain implications that he had not liked at all.

“What implications?” Edward had demanded sharply.

“We discovered that more and more left-wing elements—I mean
far
left Commie elements—had it in for you.”

“I should goddam well think they would. I've taken their goddam unions away from them.”

“Not that sort of thing at all, Eddie,” Willie said. He seemed to have gained confidence after Edward's reaction to the initial announcement. “This is all a matter of the feel for this thing that I've developed. At my own expense, so that you couldn't possibly be connected with it, I put operatives on this in Europe—and when I say Europe, I mean Moscow.”

Actually, Edward had suspected what was coming at him for a long, long time—since his first deep, confidential talks with Mitchell Palmer. Then had come the overthrow of the Russian government by the Bolsheviks, and he had devoured miles of newsprint and ticker tape and State Department reports on how those bandits had torn apart the wealth and culture of centuries in a mad scream of “revenge,” as their leaders called it. The Wobblies had been an even more threatening experience within the United States, and he had been appalled to look into the minds and hearts of fellow human beings and see hatred and envy of himself in there. When the big strikes had been attempted, strikes at industries as vital to the heartbeat of America as big steel and other great industries, in which he and many of the invisible Horizons partners were particularly committed, the entire pattern of the Soviet's blueprint for world power had become clear to him.

The USSR had launched her plan to annex the United States. Then, combining that with her own land mass, and resources such as minerals and cheap labor, and adding to it the power and prestige of the United States plus the wealth that would be stripped from Edward Courance West and his friends, Soviet Russia intended to take over the world as a possession of a handful of men in the Kremlin. Edward Courance West had stopped them. It was he, working with Horizons gang affiliates that provided the manpower from big cities, who had been able to organize the tough, mercenary civilian soldiers, the army of capitalism that had smeared the Commies across metal gates and speared them on pike fences, breaking backs and legs as they broke the concept of Moscow-inspired strikes for a fourteen-year period, which had been long enough to take them up to the war and to turn back, then paralyze Soviet Russian plans.

Here was the evidence in connected report upon written report that the Soviets not only knew who had stopped them but that they were now out to stop him. Here was immutable proof that Soviet agents had sent those poisonous letters to Irene, based upon material and information that Arnold Goff had given them. Goff was a Jew and undoubtedly a Communist, and he would do anything for power or money. The Kremlin had destroyed Irene. The Kremlin had tried to wreck his life. The Kremlin could have as many as
five hundred
counterespionage people investigating every (visible) cranny of his life, and if they could find out what they thought they could find out, they were going to try to crucify him on the tallest cross in history.

“What are they after?” he asked Willie shrilly. “What do they think they can find out?”

“Ed, take a good, hard look at yourself. You are one of the greatest Americans of your time—perhaps of any time. Forty years old—
forty years old
, but a banker among bankers, an industrialist, a visionary, a patriot—above all, a towering leader.”

“But what—”

“Listen to me, Eddie. What do you think it would do to the capitalist system if such a man were exposed as having plotted prohibition for America—”

“I didn't plot prohibition. The people wanted it. The churches wanted it. The press wanted it!”

“No, Ed! I'm with you. What I am trying to do is to bring the picture to you from
their
point of view. So I will ask again—trying to put it in their words—What do you think it would do to the capitalist system if such a man as you were exposed as having plotted to bring prohibition to the United States for reasons of self-profit, thereby causing more graft and corruption, more crime and lawlessness and loss of respect for all law and authority than any other event in the history of the world? What do you suppose would be the effect on the capitalist system if Soviet Russia could produce facts proving that this same leader had conducted the American labor movement as an industry for private gain and private profit? What would be the effect on the capitalist system if they could show that this man had crashed the Western economic system down upon the heads of the world, causing untold and uncountable hardship and misery?
That is how they are trying to paint you, Eddie
. Not with truth, but with slime, claiming that you have sold out mankind for power and money. My God, Eddie, that's the case they are trying to build and that's why they've got to be stopped.”