CHAPTER II
Promptly at ten-thirty the next night Tony Guarino entered the dark alley that led to the sheet-iron stage door of the tawdry Gaiety Theatre. And he swaggered a little as he walked. He felt big and powerful and grand, an unnatural exultation due partly to his having visited three saloons on the way over—an unusual occurrence for him —but due mainly to the fact that he was ready for anything. At the curb stood a fast and expensive sport roadster that ordinarily saw service in more nefarious enterprises. He had rented it for the evening—just why he didn't know. According to the people who were in that racket, stealing a car was about the easiest of all crimes, both to commit and to get away with; it was the way ninety per cent of criminals started. But he didn't intend to be pinched the very first time that Vyvyan honored him with her company—because she was going to go with him to-night, even if she didn't know it yet—so he had rented the roadster for the night.
In his pants pocket bulged a wad of bills that totaled two hundred dollars—all the money he had in the world. It was so arranged that a crisp new bill of $100 denomination served as "wrapper" on the outside. The inside, a few fives but mostly ones, expanded the $100 note until the roll looked to be worth ten times its real value.
Thus he had everything she had asked for. But he also had something else. In his right hand side coat pocket rested an ugly blue steel revolver he had bought that afternoon. He had never carried a gun before and he found in it a big thrill. It gave one a sense of security and power, of equality with all the world. Why, with this revolver in his pocket he was just as good as Al Spingola. Thus Tony argued himself into a state of exaltation and high courage. But deep in his own soul he wondered just how he would act if he should be forced into an actual life-and-death encounter with Spingola.
Vyvyan came prancing out a little early, glittering and fragrant as usual, an enormous picture hat framing her hard face.
"Well, fer Gawd's sake!" she exclaimed when she saw him. "Mary's little lamb is on the job again."
"Betcher life," grinned Tony. "An' I got the car an' a flock o' dough, like you wanted."
"You have?" she said mockingly. "Well, that puts little Johnny at the head of the class."
Tony's grin faded suddenly and he grabbed her arm.
"Listen, sister, don't try to kid me!" he snarled. "You an' I are goin' steppin' to-night."
"Yeah?"
"Yeah! So you might as well make up your mind to it and come along."
"Well," she said wearily, "I'm not to see Al till to-morrow night so I s'pose I might as well take a chance on you now. But I don't want anybody to see us, so that he'll hear about it." She shivered slightly. "Al's dangerous, kid. So drive to the corner of Taylor and Sangamon and wait for me there. I'll take a taxi and be along within five minutes."
"You're not giving me the run-around?"
"Absolutely not. I'll be there."
"Well, you better," said Tony darkly. "Or I'll be back to-morrow night and shoot up the place."
He entered the roadster and roared away, feeling very important. At the appointed corner, he waited nervously, muttering dire threats to himself. But she came, and hurriedly climbed in beside him. The narrow confines of the roadster caused their thighs to touch for their whole length and he felt a sudden thrill from the contact. When she looked up at him suddenly with a queer light in her greenish eyes, he knew she had felt his revolver.
"S'all right, baby," he grinned reassuringly. "I won't use it unless I have to."
He drove her to a North Side restaurant that was noted for its discretion. Seated opposite each other in a small private dining-room on the second floor, they consumed a fine and expensive meal, and two bottles of champagne. Those were the days when real champagne could be had at almost any restaurant.
The meal over, and with only another bottle and glasses on the table, Tony moved his chair around beside Vyvyan's. She had progressed nicely and by now had reached the stage where she occasionally blew a long breath upward along her face with a loud "Whoosh!", as if to blow her hair out of her eyes.
"Well, kid, how do you feel?" asked Tony, reaching for her hand.
"Kinda warm," she giggled.
"So do I."
When he took her home shortly before five in the morning, she kissed him good-night and climbed out of the roadster with a heavy sigh.
"Boy, you sure can love!" she said weakly and tottered into her cheap hotel.
Tony arose at noon that day. A close shave with plenty of powder at the end made him look a little less haggard. There was a curious sense of elation singing within him. At last he had mastered a real woman, a woman much older and more experienced than he. He had found, too, that it was the mastering of another that he enjoyed in love. The thirst for power was almost a mania with him. And the fact that circumstances and conditions made it so that he had no right to ever expect to have any made him want it all the more.
His sister, Rosie, a tall, pretty girl of sixteen, cooked a meal for him. The six other children were at school. He ate hurriedly and in silence. There was so much to do now.
Clattering down the stairs, his mother's raucous, commanding shout reached his ears. He hesitated a moment, then entered the store, looking sullen and defiant. Mrs. Guarino was a squat, wrinkled Italian woman of fifty, with a figure like a loosely packed sack tied tightly in the middle, dressed in a shapeless, indescribable gray wrapper whose waistline was invisible from the front due to her breasts dripping over it. Her unbobbed gray hair was drawn up all around and screwed into a tight knot atop her head. Heavy plain gold ear-rings hung from holes punched through the lobes of her ears. Yet despite her ugliness and barbaric appearance, her features were good, indicating native intelligence and honesty. Carlotta Guarino was a good citizen. If only she could have made her children as good citizens as were she and their father—but then that was impossible, though she didn't see why, nor did they.
"Where were you so late?" she demanded in rapid-fire Italian. "It was after five when you came in."
"Aw, I was talkin' business with somebody," answered Tony in English.
"What kind of business could you talk at that time of the morning?" she demanded again in Italian. "You come home earlier. You be a good boy like Ben and don't get us into any trouble."
"All right," assented Tony and hurried out, relieved at escaping after so short a grilling.
That was the way it always went, reproaches, recriminations, cautions. She and his father could think of more things he shouldn't do. It never occurred to him that they were endeavoring to implant in him their own code of ethics and honesty. Their crudeness of expression kept him from realizing that. Even if he had realized it, he wouldn't have accepted it. Because, while he loved his parents with the fierce, clan-love of the Latin, he did not respect their ideas. There were many logical reasons for that—their inability to learn English well, their inability to "keep step" with the times and country, their bewilderment—even after twenty years—at the great nation which they had chosen for their new home, the fact that even with his father working hard every day and his mother tending the little store they had been able to make only a bare living for the large family. So why should he accept their ideas on ethics? Where had those ideas gotten them? Tony didn't intend to live in squalor like this all his life; he meant to be a "big shot." Thus another decent home spawned another gangster, as inevitably as an oyster creates a pearl.
There were other factors, of course, that contributed strongly in making Tony a gangster. His attitude toward the law, for instance. His first contact with it had come at the age of six when, hungry, he had snatched a pear off a push-cart and a policeman had chased him. Thus, from the first, he had known the law as an enemy instead of a protection, as something which stood between him and the fruition of his desires.
His affair with Vyvyan seemed to have crystallized all this within him, to make him think and act with a ruthlessness and lawlessness hitherto foreign to him.
From a booth in a corner drug store he telephoned her at her cheap hotel.
"Hello, darling!" he said. "How do you feel?"
"Not so hot," she answered wearily. She sounded as if she had just awakened.
"I'm kinda tired myself," he admitted. 'But it was a great night, so what's the difference. . . . Listen, Vyv, don't forget that we got a date again to-night?"
"I'm s'posed to see Al to-night."
"To hell with Al!" Tony burst out angrily. "You're not seein' Al any more. Get that, baby. An' if he gets rough, I'll take care of him. I can gather up just as many gorillas for a battle as he can. So don't worry about him. Leave as early as you can to-night—he never gets around till late—and meet me at the same corner where we met last night. An' be there, baby, or there'll be hell to pay."
The rest of the day Tony spent in making an inventory of all his "rackets" or ways of making money, with a few calls putting into smooth running order those that he had neglected somewhat recently and with other calls starting brand-new ones which were not a bit popular with the unwilling customers but which were going to be profitable to him. From now on he could afford to be interested only in the most profitable ones because he had a hunch that Vyvyan was going to be a mighty expensive proposition.
Lounging early that evening in his usual poolroom hang-out, Tony looked up in surprise as an ugly wop slunk into the next chair and nudged him.
"Well?" said Tony coldly.
"You're Tony Guarino, ain't you?"
"Yeah. What of it?"
"Just this. If you go out with Al Spingola's moll again, you won't last a week. An dat's from de boss himself."
"What do you mean?" demanded Tony, though he knew well enough.
"Don't be dumb. Dey'll find you in an alley some night wit' your t'roat cut."
"I'll take my chances with him and his gorillas," bluffed Tony, and laughed. "A gun's better'n a knife any time and I can shoot better'n any of 'em. So run along, sonny, and tell your whole damn' gang to chew that on their back teeth."
Tony laughed outright at the expression of amazement on the henchman's ugly face, then with a sneering smile watched the fellow move away. In his side coat pocket that revolver still rested comfortably and reassuringly. It was amazing how much courage that weapon put into him. It bridged the difference between a David and a Goliath—it always does to a born gangster. Also that afternoon he had arranged for a friend of his who was a good shot to trail him everywhere he went at night now, and be ready to shoot down from behind anybody who tried to get Tony in the same way.
Vyvyan was nervous and shivery when she arrived at the appointed corner in a taxi and climbed into the roadster beside him.
"I'm scared, Tony," she said and gripped his arm while she looked back over her shoulder. Then half-screamed. "Oh there's another car starting up after us."
"Don't worry; that's my body guard."
"Oh! . . . Well, just as I started into the theater to-night the meanest looking man I ever saw stepped right in front of me and jammed a note into my hand. I wouldn't have been surprised if he had started to murder me right there. But he went on. When I got into my dressing-room I read what he had given me. It was written in pencil, all scrawled and dirty, but plain enough. This is what it said: 'If you stand me up again, your life won't be worth a lead nickel. Remember that!' It was from Al, of course," she finished.
"Yeah, Another one o' his muggs tried to bluff me at the pool-room to-night but I told him I was able to take care of myself with Spingola or anybody else."
They drove to the same restaurant as the night before and were shown to the same little private dining room. Half an hour later the door was thrust open violently and Al Spingola stood framed in the opening. His swarthy face was a sort of ghastly gray, his eyes blazed with the fires of hell, and his brutal mouth was set in a nasty snarl. Most important of all, his right hand was plunged deep into his side coat pocket.
Tony had turned a strange greenish white and his eyes were glazed. The encounter between himself and Spingola had come at last and that it was a life-and-death fight was obvious.
"Al!" gasped Vyvyan. "Don't do—" Her voice trailed off.
Tony and Spingola were staring straight into each other's eyes. The younger man looked nervous; it isn't easy to kill your first man.
"So you couldn't take a warning, eh, you two punks; you thought you could get away with giving me the run-around."
"Who are you?" asked Tony, knowing that to be the most disconcerting thing he could say.
"Who'm I?" spluttered Spingola. "I'll show you—"
And at that instant Tony fired through his coat pocket. He had been reaching for his napkin when Spingola came in. Immeditely but without perceptible movement, his hand had shifted to his gun. He had had the drop on Spingola the whole time and had merely created a little diversion to make absolutely sure of winning his first gun battle.
Spingola looked surprised, then sagged to the floor. With a handkerchief Tony quickly rubbed his gun free of fingerprints, then threw the weapon out the window into the alley below.
"Come, dear," he said coldly, reaching for the shaking Vyvyan's arm. Now that the deed was over, he felt strangely calm and strong, ready for anything.
He dropped a fifty dollar bill on the table and rushed the girl down the back stairs. Through the alley they hurried, to where their roadster was parked. They raced away down an impenetrably dark street just as two uniformed policemen hurried in through the café's front door. Tony wasn't worried. He knew that the owner and waiters would give a description of the people who had occupied that private dining room but it would be so vague, in case it were not actually false, that it would be absolutely valueless to the police.