to the Birthday Party Massacre. High enough that Puskis at times wondered who could be left in these gangs when you subtracted both those who were killed and those in jail for the killings. But they continued on—until June 11, 1929.
That incident was so barbaric and so unnecessary that the newly elected Red Henry felt compelled to do what previous mayors had not—end the gang war once and for all. If the Whites had thought that this show of brutality would intimidate, they had sorely miscalculated. Photographs of the corpses of young children ran above the fold of the two major dailies for days. Socially minded reporters and editors called for drastic action from City Hall. Puskis remembered a reporter named Frings being particularly vehement in his demand for steps to be taken. This same Frings would later be the loudest voice in condemning the mayor when he put an end to the Whites for good through the efforts of a previously dormant division of the police force known as the Anti-Subversion Unit.
As with everything that happened in the City, Puskis had learned about the crackdown partially from the newspapers but mostly from the stream of files that came in and went out of the Vaults. This was the first time, too, that files began to return with material removed rather than added. At least it was the first time that he noticed this happening, and he felt sure that no previous doctoring of the files would have escaped his attention.
The first time he noticed one of these files was less than a week after the massacre. The file for a White-family lieutenant named Trevor “Vampire” Reid came back light. He had been dubbed Vampire because he was sucking the lifeblood from businesses on the south end of the Hollows. Reid had liked the name so much that he had filed his front four upper teeth into points. He displayed these teeth proudly in the mug shot in his file. The photo was still in the file, but most of the appendix to the trial transcript had been removed. Only the first page of the appendix, which included the end of the actual trial transcript, remained. The appendix text on the bottom half of the sheet had been blacked out with ink. Angered by this breach of protocol, Puskis took a blank sheet of paper, placed it over the blacked-out text, and rubbed lightly with a soft-lead pencil that picked up the depressions made by the typewriter keys. The result was what appeared to be the beginning of a list of names. Puskis recognized them as other hoods in the White family and disposed of the paper so as not to arouse suspicion.
While thinking of the men whose names he had coaxed from the paper—Teddy “the Leper” Smithson, Otto Samuelson, Fat Johnny Acton, and Sam “Blood Whiskers” McAdam, among others—Puskis fell into a deep sleep in his chair, head back and mouth open to the ceiling.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
As instructed, Frings arrived at the riverbank first. It was cold, the breeze blowing from the north. Frings decided that smoking the hand-rolled juju he had in the breast pocket of his coat would help. So he leaned against a thick timber that had at one time served as a post for a jetty and with his collar up and hat down inhaled the sweet, moist smoke and felt the cold become a more-interesting-than-uncomfortable sensation on his skin. In the darkness, he closed his eyes and listened to the lap of the water against the river bank.
As he waited for Bernal, he thought about Nora and what it would be like without her. It was useless trying to think of specifics while high, but it was interesting to think about what it would feel like if he did not have her to go back to that night—or any night. It was a strange exercise and he was thinking about the difference between not having somebody in general and not having her in particular when he heard footsteps on the hill above him. Frings strained to hear other sets of footsteps above the low noise of the breeze, but without result. Bernal, as promised, seemed to be alone.
Frings watched Bernal’s cumbersome figure, silhouetted by the City’s lights, make its way down the slope. At one point Bernal put a hand down for balance and then righted himself. When he finally reached the bottom, his breathing was heavy.
“Frings?” Bernal’s voice was strained; maybe from exertion, maybe