“Is there any news?” Capone asked, earnestly.

“About what, Al?” Ness asked.

“The kid!”

“Nothing.”

Capone sighed sadly.

I stood by the seated guard, back a ways. Eliot never made a move to introduce me and Capone hardly gave me a glance; I was just another nameless Ness man, accompanying the chief. Why insinuate myself into this conversation between old friends?

Besides, I kind of savored the irony of having Capone mistake me for an Untouchable.

“Understand this, Mr. Ness-I don’t want no favors. If I ain’t able to do anything for that baby, lock me the hell back up.”

“Looks like you are locked up, Al.”

“Look. I know how you feel about me. But if they’ll only let me out of here, I’ll give ’em any bond they need. If they’re interested in getting that child back!”

Capone was trying to sound sincere in his concern for Charles Lindbergh, Jr., but what he conveyed was menace.

“You accompany me yourself, Ness. I will spend every hour of the night and day with you at my side, till we get that kid back.”

“Just the two of us, huh, Al?”

“And I’ll send my younger brother to stay here in the jail and take my place till I get back. You don’t think I’d double-cross my own brother and leave him in here, do you? Even if I could make my getaway from the great Eliot Ness! Hah?”

Ness said nothing; his faint ironic smile said it all.

Capone’s gray complexion began to redden. The lids had lifted off the gray-green eyes. In the jail cell, the pretty gunsel was playing solitaire, paying no attention to any of us. Sunlight through the barred windows made patterns on the floor.

Capone tried to channel his anger into earnestness. “Let me have a chance to show what I can do! I would know in twenty-four hours whether the child’s in the possession of any regular mob, or some single-o working his own racket. Anybody that knows anything in the underworld knows he can trust me. There is no mob going that wouldn’t count on me to make the payoff, if the family of the kid wants to go the ransom.”