“Well, thanks, but…”

“You should know a couple of things. My suggestion that you be sent was met with enthusiasm in various quarters.”

“Why in hell?”

He shrugged. “Different people want you out there for different reasons.”

“Such as?”

Eliot counted them off on his fingers. “Lindbergh wants you because he thinks you’re some kind of police hero, who saved a child. I want you there for my own purposes. But…there are people within the department who want you out there because they feel, should it come to that, you can be ‘handled.’”

Now I was getting irritated; I shifted in the hard chair. “Just because, once upon a time, I…”

He held up a hand. “Nate. I know. The Lingle case put you in plainclothes. But it also taught you a few lessons you did not expect to learn. I assume you’re still carrying the Browning your father…”

After a beat, I nodded.

He smiled faintly. “I don’t have many police contacts, Nate. You’re one of a very small handful of men on the Chicago force that I feel I can trust. I’m right about you. The men in the shadows, who think you’ll sell out for a sawbuck, are wrong.”

“Eliot, you are so right,” I said. “It would take at least a C-note.”

He didn’t know whether to smile or not. So he just shook his head.

“Come on,” he said, rising. “I want you to hear what Snorkey has to say….”

Cook County jail was on the West Side, not far from my old stomping grounds, in the midst of a Bohunk neighborhood where Mayor Cermak had relocated both the jail and the county courthouse. His Honor did this, he said, to “help real estate” in the area. That was about as straightforward a statement as any Chicago mayor ever made.

The assistant warden, John Dohmann, took us up five flights in a steel-and-wire elevator that opened onto a heavy iron-barred door, labeled Section D. Dohmann turned a heavy double key in the lock and revealed bars that enclosed the vast sunny concrete room that was Alphonse Capone’s cell, a cell that might have housed fifteen in this badly overcrowded facility. Outside the bars, facing the cell, sat a United States deputy marshal with a billy club on his belt.