And to him the Outfit was a business; and he was a businessman, and you could trust him. As much as you can trust any Chicago businessman, anyway.

Former pimp Jake Guzik, he of the greasy thumb, was in charge of the Outfit these days, while Paul “The Waiter” Ricca and Louie “Little New York” Campagna sat in stir trying to buy their way out of the sentences they got for their part in the Hollywood extortion racket, the exposure of which had led to Nitti’s demise-a suicide if you believe what you read in the papers. Fat Guzik, mob treasurer for several decades now, who would do anything for money, was somebody I’d never feel close to, though he did owe me a debt of sorts. I hoped that debt would be enough to let me survive acting as protector to Jim Ragen.

I’d tried to keep my distance from the job, assigning various ops to the bodyguard duty-even though Ragen had, from the beginning, wanted me aboard personally.

“Jim,” I’d told him, as we sat in my nicely furnished office in an admittedly less than nice building at Van Buren and Plymouth, speaking over the rumble of the El rushing by, “it’s against my better judgment getting involved in this at all. If we weren’t friends…”

“It’s because we’re friends I come to you,” Ragen had said. He wasn’t a big man; my six feet and one-hundred-eighty pounds was enough to make him look small, despite the bull neck and broad shoulders. You might even mistake him for mild, this balding, bespectacled, ruddy-complected Irishman whose tiny eyes were as blue and benign as a summer sky. Only the dimpled jutting chin hinted at the toughness and determination that had made him one of the most feared and effective circulation sluggers during the great newspaper wars early in the century.