The Gangster

  Antonio Branco climbed a slope out of the Jersey Central rail yards into a neighborhood condemned by the ever-expanding railroad and raced across town through dark streets of boarded-up tenements. Of the four lines he had seen leaving the city, there was one to the north of the Queen of the Valley’s Harrisburg line. It was the Scranton line—the line he had wanted all along but did not want the Van Dorns to know he was riding. When he reached it—down an embankment and over a fence—he looked for the train he had chosen earlier.

  Sorriso di Dio! Fortune smiled. There—the distinctive humped silhouette of the camelback center-cab 2-6-0 locomotive. The fast freight was made up and rolling, shunting out of the yard. He ran ahead, along the main line. The beam of its headlight threw shadows from his heels. He dove into the shallow trench beside the tracks and hid. The engine thundered past, straining to accelerate, in clouds of smoke and steam.

  Branco sprang into the cloud and galloped beside the moving train. The reefer cars would be full, doors locked. Empty coal hoppers were deadly in the cold wind. Looking over his shoulder, he spied a flatcar on which a steam shovel was chained like a captive. He slowed to let the car overtake him and jumped aboard.

  Nurses lingered.

  “Handsome devil.”

  “What do you suppose he’s thinking?”

  “What makes you think he’s thinking at all . . . ?”

  Physicians argued.

  “Coma—”

  “I say stupor.”

  “Coma: laceration of the brain; capillary hemorrhage; lesion.”

  “The brain is a tissue. It has a capacity for healing.”

  “Lividity of the tongue and lips. Embarrassed respiration.”

  “Swallowing—impossible in coma . . . Toxemia?”

  “Lesion.”

  A younger doctor weighed in, short on experience, long on science. “The patient’s head is not turned. His eyes are not deflected to either side. If there was a lesion, the patient would look toward it. There is no lesion.”

  “Then what?”

  “Asphyxia.”

  The moon hovered inside a silver halo. Full and perfectly round.

  It was beautiful and distant, and then it slipped away.

  The dark came back. It settled in heavily again, deep as winter.

  27

  Antonio Branco’s fast freight to eastern Pennsylvania was sidelined to let the Lackawanna Railroad’s “Phoebe Snow” passenger sleeper overtake. He jumped off the flatcar and climbed under it. Before the Phoebe Snow highballed past, he had found a safer and slightly warmer place on the rods.

  He stuck with the train until the Bethlehem Junction yards, where he dodged a yard bull and climbed under a freight to Wilkes-Barre. At Wilkes-Barre, he caught a train to Scranton, riding on the roof, when he saw brakemen checking the rods. He clung to a ventilator and kept a close eye on the tracks ahead of the locomotive so he wouldn’t be lurched off by a sharp curve, jumped when it slowed approaching the yards, found a barn a mile from the tracks, and slept in the hayloft. After dark, he climbed under a Delaware & Hudson coal train that turned slowly northeastward through Carbondale to Cadosia, where the coal hoppers were switched to the southeastwardly bearing New York, Ontario & Western Railway. He rode them at a glacial pace, night and day and night again, through Summitville, Middletown, and Maybrook.

  After Meadowbrook, he smelled tidewater.

  The first gray light of dawn revealed that the tracks squeezed between steep hills and the Hudson River, deep in mist. Estates appeared on the hillsides, Gothic, Greek Revival, and old American-style mansions set far apart on lawns as big as farms. An enormous summer tourist hotel loomed up unexpectedly, then a three-story icehouse with a wharf to barge the ice harvest to New York, then white boardinghouses, and, quite suddenly, redbrick factories.

  He heard the locomotive back off and felt the heavy cars butt couplers. When he glimpsed a huge jetty surrounded by steamers, he flexed his stiff knee to get ready to run. The train slowed for its final stop, the Cornwall Landing coal docks at the foot of Storm King Mountain.

  Filthy, hungry, and frozen to the bone, Antonio Branco had traveled five hundred miles in a circle that landed him—without a trace of where he had come from—just fifty miles north of where he had ditched the Van Dorns in Jersey City. No one knew he was there. No one knew where he came from—just another Italian pick and shovel man begging to work on the Catskill Aqueduct for a dollar seventy-five cents a day.

  As the coal train entered the yards, the morning sun cleared a hill on the far side of the river and cast yellow light on a huge estate house that reminded Branco of Greek ruins in Sicily. He recognized John Butler Culp’s famous Raven’s Eyrie. He had seen it often from the Hudson River steamboats—long before he learned that Culp was his man.

  But what riveted his attention was the sight of Culp’s private train. It was waiting in the Cornwall Landing rail yards—splendid red coaches drawn by an ink-black Atlantic 4-4-2.

  The locomotive had steam up.

  Culp could leave at a moment’s notice.

  Branco had no time to lose.

  He jumped from the rods before the train stopped rolling and ran to the aqueduct siphon shaft excavation, which he pinpointed by the sight of Negro men driving mule wagons across raw ground, and a vast cluster of locomotives, wagons, and steam shovels, emblazoned with the names of Irish contractors.

  His immigrant laborer disguise worked perfectly. Moments after he was issued a pay number on a brass token, he was approached by a “key”—a Black Hand extortionist who pretended to be a terrified fellow laborer.

  “Did you hear?” the key whispered. “The Black Hand says each man has to give a dollar on payday. They kill us if we don’t pay up.”

  “Take me to your boss.”

  “What boss?”

  Branco fixed him with a cold stare. “When your boss learns that you didn’t take me to him, he will kill you.”

  Vito Rizzo, the Black Hand gangster dealt a broken nose and a ragged ear by the Van Dorns, had been told at “confession” to establish a labor extortion racket at Cornwall Landing and await orders. He operated out of a board-on-barrels saloon down the road from the siphon shaft.

  When his gorillas marched a soot-blackened pick and shovel man into his back room, he addressed the laborer with utter contempt, failing to recognize a richly clad Little Italy prominente he had seen occasionally from a distance.

  Antonio Branco handed him a brass token. It looked exactly like the payment number identification check he had been issued at the gate.

  “Turn it over.”

  A simple asterisk had been punched into the metal.

  Rizzo jumped to his feet. “Get out of here,” he shouted at his gorillas. “All of ya.” He slammed the door behind them. Then he tugged off his hat and stared at his boots, making a point of not looking at Branco’s face—demonstrating that he could never identify this man who held over him the power of life and death.

  He spoke humbly, and he made no effort to hide his fear.

  “May I please help you, Dominatore?”

  “I need a place to clean up and eat while you get me fresh clothes, a length of bell cord, a blasting cap, and a stick of dynamite.”

  The moon hovered inside a silver halo.

  Full and perfectly round.

  The dark returned.

  The doctors had never met anyone like the extraordinarily beautiful young woman, dressed in traveling tweeds and wearied by days on the train. She fixed them with a sharp, clear-eyed gaze that brooked no equivocation and no platitudes. Each found himself struggling to answer as straightforwardly as their professors had demanded at medical school.

  “We are reasonably certain he suffered no lacerations of the brain. There are no indications of even slight capillary hemorrhage.”

  “Nor lesions in either h
emisphere.”

  “The only marks on his head were old scars, long healed. There are no wounds to his torso or his limbs. It was quite miraculous—almost as if a giant hand had closed around him when the building caved in.”

  She said, “But still he sleeps.”

  “It is possible this confirms a diagnosis that his stupor, or coma, resulted from asphyxia caused by inhalation of poisonous gas.”

  “When will he awaken?”

  “We don’t know.”

  “Will he awaken?”

  “Well . . . there is hope in that he was a strong man.”

  She rounded on them, fiercely. “He is a strong man.”

  28

  In the immortal words of Brewster Claypool: Money is made when the smart money acts on their smart ideas—bless their smart little hearts.

  Dead only five days, and already Culp missed him.

  The conductor called, “Engineer’s ready when you are, sir.”

  “One more,” said Culp.

  His man from eastern Pennsylvania was pacing the private train platform. Culp lowered his window. “Send in that bloody lawyer.”

  In came the bloody lawyer. He was one of a bunch that had reported to Claypool—sparing Culp the tedium—and he was everything that Culp’s old “partner in crime” had not been: colorless, humorless, and duller than dishwater.

  “The Department of Justice is widening the investigation of the Ramapo Water Company.”

  Culp’s face darkened. The Ramapo Grab—a dodge he and Claypool had cooked up to take over New York’s water supply—would have milked the city of $5,000,000 a year every year for forty years.

  “I thought you had spent a lot of my money encouraging them not to investigate.”

  “It would appear that the Progressives want to make an example.”

  “Why not make an example of J. P. Morgan? He stuck his big nose in the ship canal limelight. Why don’t they shine it on him?”

  The Washington lawyer answered blandly. “I’m afraid, sir, we must accept that it is what it is.”

  Lawyers loved that line of talk. “It is what it is” shifted the blame for their incompetence to the client.

  “Roosevelt is behind this.”

  “It is President Roosevelt’s Justice Department. In fact, sir, I would be remiss not to warn you that the impulse to prosecute appears to come straight from the White House.”

  “But why me, dammit? Why not Morgan’s canal?”

  Brewster Claypool would have mimicked Roosevelt fulminating in a high-pitched falsetto: “Ramapo would levy a two-hundred-million-dollar rich-man tax against the parched citizens of the nation’s greatest city.”

  Bloody, bloody hell!

  “Did you say something, sir?”

  This was much worse than Culp had feared. “I’m leaving Scranton,” he said.

  “Shall I ride back to New York with you, Mr. Culp? I can catch a Washington express from there.”

  Culp’s conductor rousted the lawyer off his train.

  His engineer blew the ahead signal.

  His locomotive steamed from the private platform, maneuvered out of the yards onto a cleared track, and began to labor up the steep grade into the Pocono Mountains. Culp got to work, dictating mental notes into a graphophone. Suddenly, the front vestibule door flew open, admitting the full thunder of the straining locomotive. He looked up. As swarthy a complexioned Italian as ever had sneaked past immigration officials pushed into his car.

  29

  “Where the devil did you come from?”

  Culp did not wait for the intruder to answer but instead grabbed his pistol from his desk drawer and leveled it at the swarthy man’s head. The only reason not to put a bullet through it was that he might be a stupid track worker who had been somehow swept along when the train left Scranton, in which case sorting it out with the local authorities would end any hope of getting to the Cherry Grove in time for a late supper. But he wasn’t a track worker; he was wearing a rucksack like a hobo.

  “Do you understand English?” he roared. “Who the hell are you?”

  The man did speak English, in a rolling manner that reminded Culp of Claypool at his most convoluted.

  “I am a stranger with an irresistible offer to become well known to you.”

  “That’ll be the day. Raise your hands.”

  The man raised his hands. Culp saw that he was holding a length of cord that stretched behind him and out the vestibule door. “What’s that string?”

  “The trigger.”

  “What? Trigger? What trigger?”

  “To trigger the detonator.”

  “Deton—”

  “I should lower my hand,” the intruder interrupted. “I’m stretching the slack. If the train lurches, I might tug it by mistake. If that were to happen, a stick of dynamite would blow up the coupler that holds your private car to your private locomotive.”

  “Are you a lunatic? We’ll roll back down into Scranton and both die.”

  “Chissà,” said the man.

  “Kiss-a? What the blazes is kiss-a dago for?”

  “Chissà means ‘who knows’ if I live or die? Or should I say we.”

  Culp cocked the .45. “You’re dead anyhow, no ‘kiss-a’ about it.”

  “If you shoot me, you will die, too.”

  “No greasy immigrant is dictating to me.”

  Antonio Branco looked calmly down the gun barrel. “I am impressed, Mr. Culp. I was told that you are more interesting than a coddled child of the rich. Strong as stone.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “Brewster Claypool.”

  “What? When?”

  “When he died.”

  Culp turned red with rage. He stood up and extended the pistol with a hand that shook convulsively. “You’re the one who killed Claypool.”

  “No, I did not kill him. I tried to save him.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “A fool I brought to help me acted like a fool.”

  “You were there. You killed him.”

  “No, I wanted him alive as much as you. I needed Claypool. He would be my go-between. Now I have no choice but to entreat you face-to-face. I’ve lost everything. My business ruined. My reputation. The Van Dorns are after me. And now, without Claypool to represent me, I stand alone with your pistol in my face.”

  “You killed Claypool.”

  “No, I did not kill him,” Branco repeated. “He was my only hope.”

  “I don’t understand . . . Lower your hands!”

  Branco lowered his hands but stepped forward so the cord stayed taut. “Don’t you know who I am?”

  “I don’t care who you are.”

  “The gas explosion.”

  “What gas explosion?”

  “On Prince Street. It destroyed tenements. You must have read it in the paper.”

  “Why would I read about explosions in Italian colony tenements?”

  “To know what happened to Isaac Bell.”

  The man had caught him flat-footed.

  J. B. Culp could not hide his surprise. “Bell? Is that what put Bell in the hospital? What is Bell’s condition?”

  “Tu sogni accarezzévole.”

  “What’s that dago for?”

  “Sweet dreams.”

  Culp laughed. “O.K. So you lost everything. What do you want from me? Money?”

  “I have plenty of money.” Still holding the string, he shrugged the rucksack off his shoulder and lobbed it onto Culp’s desk. “Look inside.”

  Culp unbuckled the flap. The canvas bulged with banded stacks of fifty- and hundred-dollar notes. “Looks like you robbed a bank.”

  “I lost only my ‘public’ business. I have my private business.”

  “What’s your private
business?”

  “Mano Nero.”

  “Black Hand? . . . In other words, you used to hide your gangster business behind a legitimate business and now you are nothing but a gangster.”

  “I am much more than a gangster.”

  “How do you reckon that?”

  “I am a gangster with a friend in high places.”

  “Not me, sport.” Culp tossed the rucksack at the man’s feet. “Get off my train.”

  “A friend so high that he is higher than the President.”

  Culp had been enjoying crossing swords with the intruder, despite the very real threat of a dynamited coupler. But the conversation had taken a vicious twist. The man was acting as if he had him over a worse barrel than crashing down the mountain at eighty miles per hour.

  “Where,” he asked, “did you get that idea?”

  “Claypool offered me the job.”

  “I don’t know what you are talking about. What job?”

  “Killing Roosevelt.”

  “Are you crazy? Claypool would never say such a thing.”

  “He had no choice,” the gangster answered coldly.

  30

  The moon hovered inside a silver halo. Full and perfectly round.

  It was beautiful and distant.

  Cold rain sprinkled his lips, then a silken brush of warmth.

  Suddenly, the sun filled the sky. It had a halo like the moon, but its halo was golden.

  Isaac Bell opened his eyes. The sun was smiling inches from his face. His heart swelled, and he whispered, “Hello, Marion, weren’t you in San Francisco?”

  Marion Morgan blinked tears away. “I cannot believe you are actually smiling.”

  “I always smile at beautiful women.”