The Unknown Beloved(44)

“I guess it’s because I look like this.” He waved a hand over his face.

“You don’t have Irish eyes.”

“Nope.”

“Or Irish skin.”

“No. I’m brown. My dad turned pink in the sun, and his hair was full-on white by the time he was forty. That’s what I am now.” He shook his head with the realization. “If I didn’t have my dad’s nose and his stubborn chin, I mighta been thrown out sooner than I was.”

“You were thrown out?”

“No. That was just something my sister, Molly, always said. I went willingly. Joined the army when I was eighteen. My mother died when I was twelve. My father kind of lost interest in life after that. Molly was older, and she always tried to look out for me, but she was just a kid herself. The army made sense for me.”

“Where is Molly now?”

“My clothes haven’t told you about Molly?” he asked.

“No, Michael,” she said, enduring his sarcasm with her usual aplomb. “They haven’t told me about Molly or your mother or your father or most of your life.”

“She’s an angel, Molly. And she’s still in Chicago. And lucky for her, we look nothing alike.”

“She looks Irish?”

“Yeah. All Irish.”

“So Capone hired you because he thought you were Italian?”

“He didn’t . . . hire me.”

“Start at the beginning.”

The beginning. He wasn’t even sure where that was. “Capone thought I was Italian . . . but that’s what I wanted him to think. That’s what I made him think. And it took a long time to make him believe it.”

“You were patient. I saw that in the silk.”

“Yeah. Well.” He cleared his throat. “I look like I could be from anywhere. Or nowhere. And I’m good with language too. In the army, I used to copy accents. Some guys tell jokes. Some guys can sing. Some guys have the gift of gab. They can talk their way out of anything. I couldn’t do that.” He shook his head. “I’m not a talker. I’m a listener. I’ve got a good set of ears. And I could mimic anyone.”

“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.