On February 14, 1929, I came to fetch Rose and found men blocking the dressmaker’s front door. One held a newspaper so close to another man’s face that neither could read it. Seven men had been killed in a Chicago garage. That was the news they brought; everything else came louder and less certainly. I pushed between two shoulders and saw Rose inside, carrying a finished bundle toward a customer who would not cross the threshold. My first thought was that the men had come for her.
“Leave it on the chair,” I told her through the glass. She looked past me at the crowd and obeyed without asking why. One man caught my coat. He knew I drove for people around Capone and wanted an answer I did not possess. “Was it your crowd?” I took his hand off the cloth. Somebody behind him said the killers had worn police clothes. Another said he knew where the next trouble would come. I had arrived from a repair shop with grease still under my nails.
The dressmaker turned her sign and tried to close the door, but a shoe held it open. I put my shoulder against the jamb, not against the man, and told him to move his foot. He swore, then moved it when the dressmaker threatened to call for a policeman. Inside, Rose had already put on her coat. “Not the front,” I said. I took the coal scuttle away from the rear passage and lifted a stuck bolt while she gathered the week’s receipts.
The back steps wore a thin skin of ice. I went down first and steadied the rail, but Rose refused my arm until her heel slipped. Then she gripped my wrist hard enough to hurt. We crossed the yard beneath hanging sheets and came out through a neighboring passage. At the corner she stopped. “You don’t answer for seven dead men because somebody recognizes your face.” I said I knew that. She looked at my coat where the stranger had pulled it. “Then learn to leave sooner.”
I took her to a customer’s kitchen rather than home, helped carry the basket inside, and waited while she counted the returned pieces. Ordinary work steadied her. It shamed me that I had nearly stood in the doorway arguing with fools while she waited behind glass. When she finished, she sent me away. She would walk back with the customer’s daughter. I could not mistake the arrangement: she had chosen company that would not draw another crowd, and I had to let her.
Paul found me that evening outside the garage where I sometimes collected assignments. He had a message for Bruno and wanted me to deliver it. Before showing me the envelope, he repeated a claim about the killings as if he had stood inside that Chicago garage. I stopped him. “Where did you hear it?” He named no witness, only a man who knew another man. I had heard enough certainty in the street that afternoon. I told him to put the envelope away.
He held it against my chest. “They’ll listen now.” I looked at the unsealed flap. Whatever private demand he meant to send about the truck, he wanted the day’s slaughter standing behind it. I pushed his hand down. He shoved me against a parked fender, and the headlamp rattled beside my elbow. For a second I had both fists closed. Then I stepped around him and opened the garage door so the dispatcher inside could see us. Paul let his arm fall.
“Not through me,” I said. “You know nothing about what happened.” “Neither do you.” “That’s why I’m not carrying it.” He folded the envelope once and put it in his pocket. I watched him walk away, unable to know whether I had stopped the message or merely lost sight of it. Inside, the dispatcher would not meet my eyes. The evening drive I had expected was canceled. The passenger had decided not to travel, he said. He offered no replacement, and I had no standing to demand one.
I stayed long enough to wipe the rain from the car I would not drive. It gave my hands something to do. Through the open door I could hear a newsboy calling, his words broken by passing tires. I knew only the public news and the fear it had spread; knowing a driver’s seat did not give me a view into a murder. At home I emptied my pockets on the table. After meals and fuel there was scarcely a week left. I counted the bills twice, then separated the money I had meant to put toward Rose’s new rent.