World, Chase Me Down by Andrew Hilleman

Author:Andrew Hilleman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2016-12-13T16:54:58+00:00

Knowledge of All Dark Things

SOME NEWSPAPERMAN IN Baltimore called the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby the biggest story since the resurrection. Most folks simply referred to it as “The Crime of the Century.” I don’t know if it was all that. There’s still more than half of this century left to be had, and a lot of ghastly things can happen in sixty years if history is our truest oracle of all things yet to come.

A feller by the name of Adolph Hitler is causing quite the sensation in Poland. It might be maybe he could prove a lot of trouble for the world if his shenanigans keep going the way they’re headed. His circumstance is all the hubbub in the daily papers.

At least from what I can tell.

Reading the dispatch of the day is no short work.

My eyes are not what they used to be. My astigmatism makes even the boldest headlines seem like an optical illusion. I have to use a pair of opera lenses over my bifocals for triple magnification just to fetch up a few back page baseball statistics. Still. I try to keep up to snuff on the spring fashions and all the Gotham society hooey, and not a day goes by that this Hitler fellow isn’t stirring the pot.

This world. I do not know her anymore.

The atrocities are beyond my fathoming.

The Crime of the Century, as it is, may yet to be had.

For a while the dubious honor belonged to that dago who stole the Mona Lisa. Vincenzo something or other. I cannot recall. No matter. He worked in the Louvre and hid the most famous painting in the world under his frock one night after closing time and hightailed it right on out of a museum more heavily guarded than a royal bank as easily as if he were lifting a pair of shoes from the Salvation Army. Made it all the way back to Florence he did. Didn’t catch the bloke for near on two years.

I understand the sentiment. An Italian masterpiece deserves to be kept in Italy. Not Napoléon’s bedroom or Louis XIV’s goddamn hunting lodge. And yet. Stealing a painting holds no candle to stealing a child.

If the world is bent on making a hierarchy of the century’s greatest crimes, one cannot forget the trick Al Capone and his thugs pulled on Saint Valentine’s Day a few years back. I enjoy a glass of spirits as much as the next bird, and prohibition was one hell of an idiotic time for an entire country in the middle of a depression and dust storms to try and collectively give up the drink. But mowing down six men with submachine guns in a goddamn warehouse over a bunch of cut-rate hooch? I’ve got the dipsomania something fierce, and the furthest I’d go for a cap of eyewater might be ransacking a gin mill.

Speaking of. It’s past ten on the Lord’s day, and it seems my tortured stomach will not be sending my morning pottage back up the pipe.

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