Page 25 of Shadow Ticket
He is interrupted by a party of wholesome types in suits just off the rack.
“Hold it, boys and girls, pursuant to federal law we have confirmed the presence of alcohol in the building, soon as local police arrive you’ll all be under arrest, sorry about that, till then behave yourselves, don’t go anywhere, and remember, compliance is the price of liberty.”
“Heiliger Bimbam,” exclaims Ulrich. “Federals been in every night this week.”
“Sure tops off the evening, don’t it.”
“Looks like ’at li’l Vic Durbow and his posse of Dry irregulars again, oh and Hicks, now that I recall, you and him have some history, don’t you—” Ulrich now considerately tossing Hicks’s heater back to him.
Catching it, “Thanks. They would’ve took that out of my paycheck,” as house flappers and lounge lizards and Skee-Ball leaguers of both sexes make anxiously for theAusgang, hired urchins meanwhile filtering everywhere handing out business cards with phone numbers of twenty-four-hour bail bondsmen.
“If dog pounds had psycho wards, that’s where most of these jokers would be recruited out of.”
The Dry agent in charge, Vic Durbow, hat brim too wide for his head keeping his eyes in shadow, leaving exposed an upper lip set in a permanent sneer, is known far and wide to be on the take from bootleggers he then turns around and collars anyway, which some call betrayal, though Vic prefers “moral integrity.” When he runs out of beer barrels to smash, Vic will settle for busting up anything he can find, leaving raid sites around town littered with free-lunch debris, petals fallen from corsages, fragments of glassware and plates, pieces of furniture. Vic’s trademark routine is to throw pool balls at speakeasy mirrors, not off-axis or anything, but straight at his own image.
Hicks’s brisk to chilly relations with the federal level date in fact from pretty much his first encounter with Agent Durbow, who had just descended on some Old-Country Germans with a busy kitchen sink. Hicks has known Mr. and Mrs. Dinkelsbühler since childhood. They’re already being tapped by the Guardalabenes for $20 a week, and now here comes this federal kiddy, new in town, with his own greasy mitt shamelessly presented.
Hicks had been asking around the Ward to see if the fee situation for Mr. and Mrs. Dinkelsbühler couldn’t be adjusted, and on his way out of this particular gin mill was nearly beaned by one of Vic’s pool balls whirring by a 64th of an inch from his left earlobe.
“Stee-rike! Hit the nigger in the head and win a free cigar!” Catching sight of Hicks, “You enjoyin the show, Buttercup?” Same look of strenuous pleasure Hicks has often noted on the faces of company goons.
“Sometimes,” Hicks with a sociable nod, “just a couple of deep breaths can help.”
“Private party here,” Vic reaching into his coat, “best you vamoose.” But Hicks has already located among the bar debris a solid oak bung starter, with which he now zeroes in, humming “On, Wisconsin!” a little off-key, and down goes Agent Durbow before any gatplay can really figure into the fun. This was still back in Hicks’s lumber-assisted period, when subdural hematomas were considered of little more account than a case of the sniffles.
“Always comes back to beer,” advises another prohi, drawing himself afree glassful from one of the few unmolested kegs remaining, “somehow, ain’t it, unending damn Great Lakes of it, beer fraud, beer vendettas, beer matrimonials. Beer clandestine, beer undeclared, beer in name only. And the kicker is, is most of it’s head, nothing more to it than foam. Kicking down the door, shoot-outs in the streets, indiscriminate pineappling, blood, wreckage, innocent lives lost, honest fortunes pissed away, all for millions of cubic feet of nothing but bitter-tasting bubbles.” Raising his glass, “Auf deine Gesundheit, so forth.”
—
During the merrymakingat New Nuremberg Lanes, Hicks picked up the impression, just from fast looks flickering between Uncle Lefty and elements of the federal assault, that these are guys who all know each other. As diplomatically as he can he brings the matter up over the next casserole, to which something new has been added though Lefty is being so coy about what it is that Hicks is reluctant to ask. This seems to amuse Lefty or at least ease him into a mood where he doesn’t mind sharing his history with the federals after that bomb in the station house went off back in 1917, and the worst that could happen happened, leaving Milwaukee PD to drift like a doper in a doped-up twilight.
Under the Curse of the Dago Bowling Ball, rolling forever down the alleys of fate, doomed to less time colliding with maple than off in the gutters, at best unlikely to pick up even easy spares, Detlef found himself reaching beyond the station house walls that had proved so frail, and out to higher levels of police, state and after a while federal, as Prohibition deepened, as the gunfire down in Chicago reached peaks unheard-of, as even more G-boys came pouring into SMEGMA (Semi-Military Entity Greater Milwaukee Area), which by then had become a staging ground for frontline operations in Chicago. Uncle Lefty found himself after and even sometimes before working hours hobnobbing more and more with the federals…
“Any thought of hiring on?” Hicks settling into an all-purpose sympathetic squint.
“Never came up. Different budget line, they wanted information more than extra gunhands. Now it seems they want to talk to you, Hicks.”
“They’re making an appointment? Polite bunch of coppers, ain’t it.”
“Low visibility. Any visit they make right now will look bad.”
“Bad for them, worse for me, as Jack Zuta might say. If he was still around to say it. I guess they want me to hop the el in to Chicago.”
“Actually they’d prefer Milwaukee.”
“Onk, there’s no such thing as a B of I office in Milwaukee, not since the good old days.”
“No, but they’re planning to reopen for business soon, same site, maybe you noticed that new construction going on over at the courthouse.”
“That’s them? Michigan Avenue side in back?”
“Five stories, all their own.”
“Anything to do with the Big Guy being in the pokey?”
“How am I supposed to know?”
“Figured you all for ace buddies.”
