The Gangster

  “Branco!” Bell shouted as he jumped for the next ladder.

  Branco went rigid with surprise at hearing his name and Claypool squirmed free, slipped through the scaffolds laid across the beams, and fell.

  Bell caught his hand as Claypool plunged and tried to swing him onto solid footing.

  The lawyer’s hand was slick with blood. It slipped from Bell’s grasp. But Bell had arrested his fall and Claypool landed at his feet, only to slide between boards again and fall to the next floor.

  Bell heard Branco scrambling overhead, racing across his tier to find a way down. It was too dark for Bell to see him. Claypool was directly under him at the edge of a pool of light cast by a dim bulb. He went down the ladder to help.

  Claypool was sprawled on his back. The man was dying. His face had been slashed repeatedly, and the fall had been brutal, but what would surely kill him was the knife in his chest. His hands moved feebly, pawing at the handle.

  Bell restrained them. “Don’t touch it. I’ll get you to the hospital.”

  Claypool made a noise in his throat that sounded like laughter. “Only if their doctors have pull with God.” He focused vaguely on Bell’s face. “Thank you for trying to save me.”

  “Was it Antonio Branco, the grocer?”

  “Big aqueduct contractor. Must be Black Hand.”

  “Did you tell Branco that Culp sent you to Brandon Finn?”

  “Culp is my friend,” gasped Claypool, and Isaac Bell watched him die with that typically enigmatic answer on his lips. Culp is my friend told no one whether Branco’s savage interrogation had forced him to reveal that J. B. Culp was the boss he had been tracking.

  Bell checked his pulse and pressed his ear to his chest, but the fixer was dead. He reached for the knife protruding from the body, pulled it free, took it under the nearest light bulb. It was a folding pocket knife with a legal-length blade. The handle was the narrow sort that Detective Warren had described, barely wider than the blade itself, and tapered even thinner at the hinge that transformed it, when open, into a stiletto.

  Bell saw no maker’s mark. It had been fabricated by a specialty cutler.

  He slung Claypool’s featherlight frame over his shoulder and carried him down six stories to the sidewalk and up Broadway to Cortlandt Street and into his building. There were no cops yet or police detectives. Back on the street, Bell met up with Warren, Kisley, and Fulton, who had caught up in a REO town car the agency had on promotional loan from the manufacturer.

  “We’re going to Prince Street,” Bell told them. “Move over, I’ll drive!”

  “Branco?”

  “He’ll need escape money. I saw him. Claypool fingered him. And I have his knife.”

  Isaac Bell drove as fast as he could, straight up Broadway, toward Prince Street. Traffic was heavy even at this late hour, but not at the standstill of business hours. The REO’s motor was fairly powerful and its horn was very loud. His Black Hand Squad, crowded in beside Bell and in the backseat, checked over their guns, and traded info about the case.

  Bell’s Black Hand and President Assassin cases had converged like a pair of ocean liners on a collision course. The saloon keeper Ghiottone had recruited a Black Hand man to kill President Roosevelt, and Antonio Branco had seized the opportunity to send the ultimate Black Hand letter.

  “The scheme backfired when Ghiottone told Branco.”

  “Instead of killing the President, Branco killed his way back up the recruiting chain to blackmail the man on the top.”

  “Can you imagine what Culp would pay?”

  “Branco could imagine,” Mack Fulton said to general laughter. Bell wondered, though. Would it be enough for Branco to risk his entire setup or did he have his eye on something more?

  Ghiottone’s saloon had been taken over by the dead man’s cousins and was doing a roaring business again. Across the street, Branco’s Grocery was dark and shuttered.

  “Hang on,” shouted Bell.

  He wrenched the steering wheel. The REO jumped the curb. He drove onto the sidewalk and blasted through Antonio Branco’s front door ten feet into the store. The Van Dorns leaped out, guns drawn. They fanned out into the maze of stock shelves, Bell in the lead.

  “Find lights . . . Wait! I smell gas.”

  “Maybe Branco stuck his head in an oven.”

  “Stove in here is fine,” Mack Fulton called. “No leak.”

  “Don’t turn on the light. Get out. Get out now!”

  The odor was suddenly so strong, it smelled as if a torrent of gas was gushing into the store straight from a city main. Bell felt light-headed. “Get out, boys! Get out before it blows.”

  The Van Dorn Black Hand Squad bolted for the door they had smashed.

  “Leave the auto.”

  Bell was counting heads, vaguely aware that he was having trouble keeping track, when he heard Harry Warren shout. He could barely make out what he was saying. Warren sounded blocks away.

  “Come on, Isaac! We’re all out.”

  Bell turned slowly to the door.

  He saw a flash. The REO reared in the air like a spooked horse. Cans flew from the walls. Jars shattered and barrels split open, but the tall detective had the strangest impression of total silence. It was like watching a moving picture of a volcano.

  Then the floor collapsed under his feet and the ceiling tumbled down on his head.

  BOOK III

  Storm King

  26

  The streets were crawling with cops and Van Dorns.

  Antonio Branco stepped from a tenement doorway, hurried twenty feet to Banco LaCava, and tapped his signet ring on the glass. David LaCava looked up from the gold he was stacking in his show window. Branco watched his expression and got ready to run. LaCava saw Branco. He gaped, shocked. Then relief spread across his face and he ran to unlock the door.

  “You’re alive!”

  Branco pushed through and closed it behind him.

  “They said you were missing in the explosion.”

  Branco made a joke to lull the banker. “Almost as bad. I was upstate in the Catskills.” Then he turned fittingly grave. “I came back on the night boat. I only heard of the explosion this morning when we docked.”

  “How bad is it?”

  “I couldn’t see. The cops and firemen and sewer and building departments are squabbling over who commands the recovery. Fortunately, none of my people were in my building. But they say some poor souls are trapped in the tenements.”

  “There’s a rumor Isaac Bell was in the building.”

  “I heard that, too—God knows what he was doing there. Here! Take these.” He thrust a wad of paper into LaCava’s hands.

  “What is this?”

  “Receipts and bills of lading for a pier house full of wine I stored on West 21st Street. You can see my situation. All my store stock is lost. I need to borrow cash to fill orders for the aqueduct.”

  “Is Prince Street insured?”

  “It will take time to get the money and I need to buy new stock now. Total these up; you’ll see the wine’s worth fifty thousand. Can you advance me thirty?”

  “I wish I could, my friend. I don’t have that much on hand. My depositors are only trickling back.”

  “Whatever you can lend me right now . . . Immediately.”

  Ten minutes after the grocer left with a satchel of cash, grim-faced detectives from the Van Dorn Black Hand Squad burst into the bank.

  “Have you seen Antonio Branco?”

  David LaCava said, “You just missed him. May I ask, is there any word on Mr. Bell?”

  “No. Where did Branco go?”

  “To buy stock. He has orders he must fill for the aqueduct.”

  Harry Warren and Eddie Edwards stared at the banker.

  “Aqueduct?” Warren echoed.

  “What are
you talking about, Mr. LaCava? Branco’s not filling orders; he’s on the run.”

  “What do you mean?” asked LaCava.

  “The thieving murderer blew up his own store,” said Warren.

  “We hoped he was buried in it,” growled Eddie Edwards. “But someone saw him on the street headed this way.”

  LaCava turned paper white as the blood drained from his face. “Basta!”

  Harry Warren gripped the banker’s shoulder. “What’s wrong?”

  “I didn’t know. Everybody said it was an accident.”

  “‘Everybody’ was wrong. He blew it up, along with three buildings next door and half the graveyard.”

  “I just lent him twenty thousand dollars . . . But I have these! Don’t you see? Collateral. You are mistaken. He is Antonio Branco. He has the Catskill Aqueduct contract.”

  “Honest as the Lottery?”

  “But these bills of lading—”

  The Van Dorn snatched them out of his hand.

  Clad like a rich merchant, in a blue topcoat, a red scarf, and a derby hat, Antonio Branco tallied wine barrels on a Hudson River freight pier at 22nd Street. Stevedores were rolling them up the gangway onto a coaster about to sail for Philadelphia. The ship’s captain stood beside Branco and they counted the barrels together. When the last were stowed in the hold, the captain gave Branco bills of lading attesting that the fifty-thousand-dollar cargo was aboard his ship.

  Branco hurried two blocks to a wine broker who had already agreed to buy the bills of lading at a discount. Then he took the ferry across the river to Jersey City and walked to a laundry that served the working class neighborhood. The proprietor, a tiny old Chinaman with a misshapen face and a blinded eye, sorted through paper-wrapped packages of clothes never picked up and sold him a pair of rugged trousers, a short coat, and a warm watch cap that wouldn’t blow off in the wind.

  A thoroughly disgusted Harry Warren stared long and hard at the empty slip from where a coaster had departed an hour earlier. Eddie Edwards stomped out of the pier house, looking equally fed up.

  “First the ice-blooded scum takes LaCava for twenty grand cash. Then he sashays across town, big as life, and leaves the pier here with fifty grand in bills of lading, according to the clerk in the pier house, for the same wine that he can turn to another quick thirty thousand cash—bills of lading being damned-near legal tender.”

  “On the lam with enough money to charter a private train.”

  “Or an ocean liner.”

  The detectives exchanged another black look, knowing that neither had exaggerated the value of Branco’s haul. Fifty thousand dollars would buy a country estate, with servants, gardeners, gamekeepers, and a chauffeur to drive the lucky owner home from the railroad station.

  “Now what?”

  “Jersey City.”

  “What’s there?”

  “Fellow in there sent a boy after him. One of the bills had fallen off the pile. The kid spotted him on the ferry too late. It was pulling out of the slip.”

  Branco changed clothes in the Jersey Central Communipaw Terminal men’s room and left those he had been wearing by a church, where some tramp would run off with them soon enough. He bought a surplus Spanish-American War rucksack to carry his cash and field glasses and ditched his fancy leather satchel. He gorged on a huge meal in a cheap lunchroom and rented a room in a ten-cent lodging house. He studied freight and passenger train schedules. Finally closing his eyes for the first time since he had killed Brewster Claypool, he slept soundly until dark. He ate again—forcing himself to cram his belly while he could—then followed his ears toward the clamor of steam pistons, switch engine bells, and locomotive whistles rising from the New Jersey Central train yards.

  It was a cold, dark night, with a cutting wind under an overcast sky. Row upon row of parked trains sprawled under a swirling scrim of smoke and steam. Countless sidings merged from the freight car float piers and passenger terminal that rimmed the Hudson River into four separate sets of main lines leaving the city.

  Branco tried to choose his train from a street that overlooked one of the lines. But there were hundreds of lines, and thousands of freight cars—an ocean of lanterns, sidelights, and headlamps—screened by electric and telegraph wires and poles. He noticed a disused switching tower in the middle of the dimly lit chaos that would give him a better perspective.

  An empty lot behind a fence sloped down to the tracks. Skirting yard lights, dodging headlamps, watching for rail bulls, he climbed between cars at their couplings and worked his way across a score of sidings to the dark tower. A fixed ladder led to its roof, where he swept the yard with his field glasses.

  Van Dorns were watching.

  He spotted one slipping money to the regular yard bulls—recruiting man hunters. The detective gave himself away with an appearance that was a mighty cut above the regular rail cops and an expression of cold rage, mourning his precious Isaac Bell.

  Branco was not surprised. Any detective worth his salt carried the same railroad maps in his mind as he did and knew that for a man running to distant jurisdictions, Jersey City was the place to start. Scores of rail lines fanned south and west to Philadelphia, Baltimore, Pittsburgh, Chicago, St. Louis, San Francisco—each city home to a teeming Italian settlement.

  The Van Dorns also knew that he couldn’t risk riding as a paying passenger scrutinized by ticket clerks, platform guards, porters, and conductors. Trapped aboard a speeding flyer, no matter how fast, he could never beat a telegraph bulletin to the next station. So they would search all the places he would try to steal a ride: on the reinforcing rods underneath a car; or on top, clinging to a roof; or sheltered from the cold inside an unlocked boxcar; or riding “blind” platforms in front of baggage cars.

  From the many trains that the switch engines were making up, he picked out a fast freight headed by a powerful camelback 2-6-0 locomotive. It consisted of flatcars carrying mining machines, empty coal hoppers, and reefers of fresh beef from the Jersey City slaughterhouses. Branco judged by the number of cars, some thirty that the busy switch engines had already shunted to it, that it would soon be highballing for Pennsylvania’s anthracite coalfields—first stop, Bethlehem Junction.

  He edged toward the ladder, only to be distracted by a passenger train that emerged from the Communipaw Terminal and snaked slowly through the yards, its windows a warm russet glow in the bitter cold. The hour and the 4-4-2 locomotive towing twin baggage cars, four Pullmans, and a club car, said it was probably the crack Harrisburg flyer, “Queen of the Valley.” Branco imagined the passengers settling into deep armchairs with cocktails in hand and every expectation of sleeping in their own beds by midnight. Motion of a different kind jolted him out of his reverie.

  A man on foot was striding the crossties of a siding that curved beside the tower.

  Switch yard brakeman? Rail cop? Hobo? Ignoring the locomotives steaming around him, he was coming Branco’s way as purposefully as a lion stalking prey through a herd of elephants. No hobo walked like that; no brakeman, either. He had to be a rail cop or, worse, an alert Van Dorn who had spotted the empty switch tower for a fugitive’s spy house.

  A switch engine headlamp swept the siding. The beam blazed on a shock of white hair, and Antonio Branco recognized Isaac Bell’s Black Hand Squad detective Eddie Edwards, his face aflame with vengeance. Branco rolled off the roof, slid down the ladder, and sprinted after the Queen of the Valley.

  The flyer was picking up speed even as it lumbered through countless switches that were shunting it from rail to rail out of the yard and toward the main line. He heard the detective give chase, boots ringing, running after him full tilt like a man who knew as well as Branco the treacherous footing of tracks, crossties, gravel, and ankle-snatching gaps beside switch rails.

  Running as hard as he could, Branco pulled ahead of the lead baggage car, jumped for a handrail, and hauled hims
elf onto the platform between the front of the car and the locomotive’s tender. A brakeman was hiding there in the dark, his lantern unlit, lying in wait for hobos. He swung the lantern, threatening to brain Branco with it, and shouted, “Get off!”

  When caught, a hobo was expected to jump off as ordered: Go try to steal a ride on some other brakeman’s train. To resist was to bring down the wrath of the entire crew. But Branco was trapped. The Van Dorn detective was right behind him and catching up fast.

  “Get off!”

  The brakeman swung his lantern. Branco grabbed it, pulled hard, and used the man’s momentum to yank him across the platform and off the blind.

  The brakeman flew out of the dark, straight at Eddie Edwards in a blur of pinwheeling limbs. Edwards was not surprised. Brakemen often rode hobo patrol on baggage car platforms, rousting tramps, until their train was out of the yard, and Antonio Branco had proven repeatedly he was no ordinary tramp.

  The detective dodged a boot and ducked under a heavy lantern that passed so close to his skull that it knocked his hat off. The train was accelerating, the engineer unaware of the drama behind him. Edwards put on a desperate burst of speed. He pounded alongside the blind. At his feet, a switch appeared out of nowhere. He cleared the yawning slot by a miracle and swung onto the blind, one hand on a grip, the other clenched in a fist for Branco.

  The platform was empty.

  He looked up. Branco had climbed onto the roof.

  Grabbing ironwork, Edwards jumped onto a hand-brake wheel, muscled his way up between the front of the baggage car and the tender, and hauled himself onto the sloping end of the roof.

  The roof was empty.

  He whirled his head, thinking Branco was on the tender about to smash him with a lump of coal. But the tender was empty, too. He looked down at the empty blind. Where had the gangster gone? Only one place. Off the train. He must have jumped out the other side of the blind, back into a yard full of rail cops and angry detectives.