“Am I…under arrest?”
“You’re under arrest.”
“What…what charge?”
“Kidnapping.”
She sighed. Nodded.
“This is the Lindbergh baby, isn’t it?”
She cocked her head, like she hadn’t understood me. Her Master’s Voice.
“Well?” I said. “Isn’t it?”
“Mister,” she said, “that’s Hymie Goldberg’s kid.”
“Hymie Goldberg?”
“The bootlegger. In Peoria. He’s loaded. We were gonna get five grand for the little bastard.”
My boss burst in the open door, then. Lou Sapperstein, a sturdy, balding cop of about forty seasoned years. He took off his hat, eyes wide behind wire-framed glasses; snow dusted his topcoat like dandruff. He had a.38 in one hand.
“What the hell are you up to, Nate?”
“I just cracked the Hymie Goldberg kidnapping,” I said.
And I handed him the baby.
1
THE LONE EAGLE MARCH 5-APRIL 18, 19322
“There’s somebody I want you to meet,” Eliot Ness said.
I sat slumped in a hard wooden chair in Eliot’s spartan, orderly office in the Transportation Building on Dearborn.
“And who would that be?” I asked.
“Al Capone,” Ness said, with the smile of a mischievous kid.
Eliot was leaning back in his swivel chair, sitting with his back to his rolltop desk. He was a fairly big guy, about my height-six feet-with broad shoulders on an otherwise lithe frame; his upper torso had gotten powerful from a stint dipping radiators at the Pullman plant as a youth.
The biggest surprise about Eliot Ness-for those who’d read newspaper and magazine accounts of his exploits as a gang-busting prohibition agent-was his youth, his boyishness. Eliot was twenty-eight years old, with a ruddy, well-scrubbed appearance and a sprinkling of freckles across his Norwegian nose. That he was an ambitious young exec moving up the ladder of life was evident only in his impeccable three-piece steel-gray suit and black-and-white-and-gray speckled tie.