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When trouble comes to town, it usually takes the North Shore Line. What with tough times down the Lake in Chicago, changes in the wind, Prohibition repeal just around the corner, Big Al in the federal pokey in Atlanta, Outfit affairs grown jumpy and unpredictable, anybody needing an excuse to get out of town in a hurry comes breezing up here to Milwaukee, where it seldom gets more serious than somebody stole somebody’s fish.
“You’ve somehow come to safety, Hicks,” it seems to his aunt Peony, “safe in the featherbed of your destiny, not by refraining from violence but by embracing it, surviving
On days of low winter light the federal courthouse can take on a sinister look, a setting for a story best not told at bedtime, the jagged profile of an evil castle against pale light reflected off the Lake, bell tower, archways, gargoyles, haunted shadows, Halloween all year long.
Out with a jarful of cocaine crystals, producing a miniature hand-cranked grinder and sifting a cone of white powder which he then carefully formats into a number of nose-appropriate lines, a routine known around Chicago as “hitching up the reindeer.”
some grand face-off between the cheese-based or colonialist powers, basically northwest Europe, and the vast teeming cheeselessness of Asia,
