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“Sometimes we have twenty-five or thirty thousand dollars in there,” Bremer said. “That’s at the peak of the business month.”

“Supposing we were to turn you loose,” Karpis said. “Would you go in and get this money and bring it back for us?”

Bremer got excited when Karpis talked this way. He suggested several schemes to raise money; at one point, to Karpis’s dismay, he named a wealthy St. Paul railroad executive he felt could be kidnapped. In an effort to bond with his captors, Bremer was candid about his own dealings with the underworld. He talked openly about how he had fenced Harvey Bailey’s stolen bonds. At one point, he asked Karpis whether he knew Harry Sawyer or his partner, Jack Peifer. Karpis said no.

“Well,” Bremer said, “they run the town and if you find out who they are, then you’ll find out who I am. You just ask them about me and how many times I’ve handled hot bonds for them. I’m a good guy. If you guys had come to me first instead of kidnapping me, you’d have made more money by kidnapping somebody else that I told you about.”

“Well, let’s wait and see first if we get that $25,000 you’re talking about,” Karpis said. “Maybe we’ll get forty.”

Bremer became glum. “I don’t think they can pay that much.”

One night Freddie and George Ziegler arrived unannounced from St. Paul. They were tired and frustrated. They had seen the eagle stickers split in two, and concluded that the Bremers wanted to pay only half the ransom. “I don’t know what the hell to tell you,” Ziegler said. “That town is so hot, every time we try to get a note to them people, the G beats us to it. Every time we try to phone and tell them where there’s a note, the G’s listening in. They just don’t want to make the payoff, they don’t want anything. Did you hear what Roosevelt had to say?”

“The president?” Karpis asked.

In a radio address, Roosevelt had termed the Bremer kidnapping “an attack on all we hold dear.” “Yeah,” Ziegler said, “he brought it up about Bremer being a friend of his and that he would see to it that this crime wasn’t going to go unpunished. This is the hottest goddamn thing since the Lindbergh kidnapping.”

“Well, what do you think about them paying the money, or turning him loose without any money?”

“No, no, no,” Ziegler said. “We’d never be any hotter than we are right now, whether we get the money or not. Don’t tell them other guys I said this, but we’re gonna be in big trouble after this is over with. This might even turn out worse if we have to kill the guy.”

As the days passed, Karpis grew steadily more depressed. At best he was a babysitter with a machine gun. At worst he would be an assassin. This, he thought, was not why he became a thief.

Tucson, Arizona, a sun-baked desert city of thirty thousand people, was about as far from the Dillinger Gang’s Midwestern roots as they were likely to get. After the long drive from St. Louis, Dillinger arrived that Sunday a changed man, the hubris he had displayed in East Chicago knocked from his personality as if by a punch. The shoot-out on the sidewalk that day taught him a lesson, to take fewer chances, to live more quietly; there would be no more nights machine-gunning the moon.

Dillinger and Billie found the others already enjoying the city’s tequila-fueled nightclubs and whorehouses.be Russell Clark was staying with Charles Makley at the city’s premier place of lodging, the Congress Hotel. Makley had hooked up with a torch singer, and everyone was having a grand time. Dillinger and Billie checked into a tourist court on South Sixth Street, registering as “Mr. and Mrs. Frank Sullivan” of Green Bay, Wisconsin. A few hours later Pete Pierpont and Mary Kinder drove in as well, after several days visiting family around Albuquerque.

To the men of the Dillinger gang, whose lives to that point had been confined to Midwestern farms and jail cells, Tucson seemed like another planet. Men wore cowboy hats and boots. Mariachi music floated through the evening air. There were mountains