“Boys and their broads,” Cal tsked. “I didn’t take you for the type to pretend like that, maybe when I first met you but not anymore. Look around,” he waved his arms wildly, “Towertown is alive. The rest of the city’s on the decline, and we’re steady.”

“First of all, she’s nothing to me. I met her today and I won’t see her tomorrow or the day after that. Second, parlors in Towertown are closing too.”

“Not Abe’s.”

“Not Abe’s,” I conceded. Thankfully my ledger was still quite full.

“Rich people come to The Gallery every week, you see them, joining along in the merriment, listening to Rosie sing, emotion welling in their eyes. They participate.” He was taking the tone of my scorched skin, spurred partially by passion but mostly by a palpable rage. I had learned during my time with Cal, stereotypes regarding redheads rang true, though I really fucking loved his hue.

“The people you’re talking about come to see something new, to gossip, to gawk at them.”

“At us,” Cal roared, chucking the discarded pen at my head. “At us.”

“Calm down,” I admonished, sighing as I muttered, “You and your revolution.”

“Ours,” he whispered, shaking his head as tears streamed down his cheeks, puddles of pain falling on the papers spread over his sheets. “It’s ours.”

It hadn’t been the first time we had the fight and it wouldn’t be the last, but as he cried in my arms, I feared one day I would finally snuff the spark I’d seen in him years prior, or he would leave me before I could.

15

December 1933

Somehow up from the sea of folks who were better than me, I had risen, taking my unmerited place in the middle of the food chain, sharks above and minnows below. I had been treading while others sank, oceans of illicit whiskey hoisting me, my head held above the water, lungs full of air, pockets brimming with money. And I hadn’t deserved any of it.

There were schools of men more violent and vile than me who warranted worse, yet achieved better, and though I wanted to believe there were leagues between us, we all fed on the bottom to fatten ourselves up. From Al Capone, who was weak and syphilis-ridden in a Georgia penitentiary, to the recently indicted “Handsome Jack” Klutus, ringleader of the ‘College Kidnappers,’ the big fish were fried, and on December 5, 1933, the government cooked me too.