companies must want this Papadopoulos plenty to hang a hundred thousand on him.”
“Cheap enough if it lands him,” I said. “Maybe he’s not all the newspapers picture him as, but he’s more than a handful. He gathered a whole damned army of strong-arm men here, took over a block in the center of the financial district, looted the two biggest banks in the city, fought off the whole police department, made his getaway, ditched the army, used some of his lieutenants to bump off some more of them—that’s where your brother Paddy got his—then, with the help of Pogy Reeve, Big Flora Brace and Red O’Leary, wiped out the rest of his lieutenants. And remember, these lieutenants weren’t schoolboys—they were slick grifters like Bluepoint Vance and the Shivering Kid and Darby M’Laughlin—birds who knew their what’s what.”
“Uh-huh.” Carey was unimpressed. “But it was a bust just the same. You got all the loot back, and he just managed to get away himself.”
“A bad break for him,” I explained. “Red O’Leary broke out with a complication of love and vanity. You can’t chalk that against Papadopoulos. Don’t get the idea he’s half-smart. He’s dangerous, and I don’t blame the insurance companies for thinking they’ll sleep better if they’re sure he’s not out where he can frame some more tricks against their policy-holding banks.”
“Don’t know much about this Papadopoulos, do you?”
“No.” I told the truth. “And nobody does. The hundred thousand offer made rats out of half the crooks in the country. They’re as hot after him as we—not only because of the reward but because of his wholesale double-crossing. And they know just as little about him as we do—that he’s had his fingers in a dozen or more jobs, that he was the brains behind Bluepoint Vance’s bond tricks, and that his enemies have a habit of dying young. But nobody knows where he came from, or where he lives when