The Gangster Page 7

  “Like railroads?” asked Branco.

  “Or the telegraph. Or Standard Oil and U.S. Steel. But since most criminals have trouble organizing a clean shirt in the morning,” Isaac Bell added with a smile, “it would require powerful adjustments of attitude.”

  Bell walked away.

  Antonio Branco enjoyed a private moment of satisfaction. Despite the detective’s flattering compliments about his English, to lull him into letting down his guard, he still formed thoughts in Italian. When, and if, you do catch them, Mr. Bell, who will you have caught? Peasants. Contadini. Of which Italy has an endless supply.

  Most criminals have trouble organizing a clean shirt?

  Mr. Bell, you and your Van Dorn Detective Agency will be amazed when a criminal organization spans your nation.

  Suddenly, Bell was back, striding at Branco like a panther, his eyes aglow.

  “Mr. Branco.”

  “Did you forget something, Mr. Bell?”

  “Do you recall when we met before?”

  “I doubt we’ve run in the same circles.”

  “Eleven years ago. I was a student.”

  “Eleven years ago, I was a laborer.”

  “In New Haven, Connecticut.”

  “Wherever there was work.”

  “I was at college in New Haven.”

  “As I said, we did not run in the same circles.”

  “We were running, all right. Both of us. Running from New Haven Railroad cinder dicks.”

  Branco smiled. He looked intrigued. “Not in New Haven. I ran from no railroad police in New Haven.”

  “North of New Haven. In the Farmington yard.”

  Antonio Branco stared at Isaac Bell. He moved near and inspected him very closely. Then he stepped back and looked him up and down, hat to boots. “Incredibile!” he breathed at last. “Incredibile!”

  “You remember?”

  “It is incredible. Yes, I do remember. I did not get much of a look at you in the dark, but your stance is the same.”

  “So is yours,” said Bell. “And your limp. Do you still carry your knife?”

  “What knife?”

  “The one you pulled on me.”

  Branco smiled. “I recall no need to pull a knife on a college boy.”

  “You did,” said Bell. “And you also pulled one on a rail cop in New Haven earlier that night.”

  “No.”

  “Right before you rode my train to Farmington.”

  “No, Mr. Bell. I did not pull a knife on a rail cop. I did steal a ride on your train . . . I didn’t realize it was your train. I thought it belonged to the railroad.”

  Bell could not help but smile back. “I borrowed it. College high jinks.”

  “I guessed as much,” said Branco.

  “The rail cop was attacked that same night. Did you happen to witness it?”

  Branco hesitated. Then he shrugged. “It was long ago.”

  “So you did see it.”

  “A tramp cut the rail cop and ran away. It did allow me to escape, but I am not the man who cut him. Was the cop badly injured?”

  “He survived,” said Bell.

  “Then all is well that ends well.”

  “He was horribly scarred.”

  “Good. I am glad to hear that.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “He ‘scarred’ me, too. Nearly broke my leg. You yourself see, I limp to this day. It aches when storms are coming. Which is not supposed to happen to young men like me and you.”

  “Who was the man with the knife?”

  “The tramp? I never saw him before.”

  “The cop said he was Italian.”

  “Many hobos were Italian in those days. Still are. I didn’t know him. But I owe him. Thanks to him, I escaped the railroad cop. You owe him, too.”

  “How do you reckon that?”

  “Thanks to him, you weren’t caught when you ‘borrowed’ your train, which you would have been if he hadn’t slashed the cop. So we have that tramp in common. He saved us both for better things.”

  “What better things?”

  “The laborer became a business man. The train thief became a detective.”

  Isaac Bell laughed. “Only in America.”

  The tall detective and the wealthy grocer exchanged a powerful handshake.

  Branco returned to his business, and Bell caught the train uptown.

  Harry Warren was waiting in the detective bull pen. “Black Hand?”

  “I can’t read him yet. But whatever Antonio Branco wants, he’s capable of getting. A formidable man. Angry man, too, though he covers it. Mostly”—Bell considered Branco’s tale of the tramp and the railroad cop and added—“he’s also a first class liar.”

  Wally Kisley came in the back entrance, still in the costume of a rag collector with dirty hands and face. “I got something for you.”

  From his rag sack he pulled a red tube that looked like a dynamite stick. Detectives nearby edged away. Kisley tossed it to them and they dove for cover. It bounced on the floor with a hollow thunk.

  Kisley grinned. “I emptied the nitro.”

  Bell asked, “Where’d you find it?”

  “Under LaCava’s safe.”

  “Why blow the safe? It was open during the day.”

  “I think it was part of the bundle that blew the wall. But it misfired. Got blown through the wall and bounced under the safe.”

  “What does it do for us?”

  “Read the name.”

  “Stevens.”

  “You can’t buy the Stevens brand in New York City. It’s made in New Jersey by a subsidiary of Dupont’s Eastern Dynamite Company and distributed to small-town hardware stores. It’s a short stick, shorter than what you’d find in mining or big excavation jobs. For farmers blowing stumps.”

  “Where’d the Black Hand get ahold of it?”

  “Some hardware or feedstore in New Jersey or Pennsylvania, I’d guess. Point is, they didn’t buy or steal it in New York City.”

  Bell remembered that Giuseppe Vella claimed that his foreman, Russo, had discovered the overcharge too late to stop the water main explosion. It was a long shot, but he wondered whether Russo had noticed in the confusion the type of dynamite in the overcharge?

  Vella had no telephone since the Combustibles Department put him out of business. Bell hurried downtown and found him at his house on 13th Street. Vella greeted him warily, and Bell guessed that he had paid the ransom the Black Hand had demanded for the rescued Maria. He showed Vella the empty Stevens dynamite tube.

  “Have you ever seen this brand?”

  “In the countryside.”

  “Not in New York?”

  “Not on my jobs.”

  “Did your foreman Russo happen to say anything about the dynamite in the overcharge?”

  “He was excited, yelling, ‘Big-a bang! Big-a bang!’”

  “But when he disconnected the detonating wires, would he have noticed what brand it was?”

  Vella shrugged. “Who knows?”

  Only Russo, thought Bell. “Is it possible, Mr. Vella, that Russo himself laid the overcharge for the Black Hand?”

  Vella shrugged. “Who knows? Anything is possible.”

  “How likely?”

  “Not likely. Sante Russo is a good man.”

  “Do you know where he is?”

  Vella hesitated.

  Bell said, “I am hunting the criminals who ruined your job. The criminals who kidnapped your daughter. Russo can help me find them.”

  “How?”

  “It is important that I learn if this is the same dynamite that ruined your job.”

  Vella nodded. “O.K. I understand . . . Russo sent a telegram asking would I wire him the money he was owed for hi
s last week of work. His salary.”

  “Where did you send the money?”

  “What makes you think I paid him?”

  “You’re an honest man, Giuseppe Vella. It would never occur to you not to pay a man who worked for you. Even if he’s on the run and can’t collect it. Did he come for the money or did you send it?”

  “He asked that I wire it to St. Louis.”

  Isaac Bell set his squad on a search for foreman Russo.

  8

  Brewster Claypool was a slim-as-a-wisp, graceful Southerner who reminded people of the witty and stylish Oscar Wilde. Slouching languidly from the Metropolitan Opera House in white tie and tails, drifting down Broadway like an elegant parenthesis, he peered into the darker cross streets with a connoisseur’s appreciation of New York’s Tenderloin. Brightly lighted Broadway was lined with fine hotels and restaurants, but the rest of the district was devoted to sin. If a vice could be imagined, the Tenderloin offered it in gambling dens, dance halls, saloons, and bordellos priced for every purse. The Progressives called it Satan’s Circus. Brewster Claypool called it Heaven.

  He mounted the steps to the Cherry Grove bordello, a lavishly furnished elite house known as the Ritz of the Tenderloin, and rang an electric bell. A three-hundred-pound door guard ushered him into the sturdy brick mansion with great respect. A dazzling young woman in a red evening gown greeted him warmly. “Upstairs, Mr. Claypool?”

  “I think I’ll pop into the club first.”

  A group of top Wall Street men had formed a private club inside the whorehouse. The Cherry Grove Gentlemen’s Society membership requirements were: extreme wealth and no blue noses. The house rules: No conversation or event left the room. No women were allowed in wearing more than two garments—neither garment could exceed the surface area of a dinner plate; a measuring stick was kept handy to settle disputes.

  Claypool found his brother members lounging in vast leather armchairs, drinking champagne and whiskey cocktails. John Butler Culp, a vigorous big-game hunter and yacht racer who maintained the physique of a college pugilist and football hero, was cursing President Roosevelt.

  “This wild, arrogant man, who only became president when the radicals assassinated President McKinley, will inflict fatal injury on our nation.”

  Culp was a Wall Street titan—sometimes partner, often as not rival, of J. P. Morgan, Judge Congdon, Frick, Schwab, and J. D. Rockefeller. He combined cunning financial strategies with strict management to spawn railroads, mines, and mills, to consolidate wealth into great wealth, and to sharpen great wealth into power. He had the ear of Supreme Court justices, United States senators in his pay, and the confidence of presidents, but not this one. Late at night, alone with fellow “Cherry Grovers,” he allowed his animosity free rein in a cold voice brimming with righteous fury.

  “President McKinley defended property rights. This Roosevelt is a socialist rabble-rouser snatching our property.”

  “Teddy claims he won’t run again,” a banker interrupted.

  “He lies! America is doomed if this darling of the Progressives serves this full term. Men of means will have no place in this country if he hangs on long enough to get reelected in ’08.”

  Culp delivered this last with a glance at Brewster Claypool, a flash of dark eyes under heavy brows, so swift that none of the others noticed.

  Claypool waved languidly to a raven-haired beauty in no danger of violating the dress code. She hurried to him with a crystal Old Fashioned glass and a bottle of Bushmills. “Just a splash, my dear. I must be on my way.”

  “Aren’t you coming upstairs?”

  “Not tonight, I’m afraid. I would be too distracted to be amusing.”

  He took his drink into the small library off the main room, settled into an armchair, and prayed that Culp would join him.

  Claypool was “Culp’s man,” and he had heard enough to know that he had just received his marching orders. Truth be told, he had seen this coming since Roosevelt was elected in ’04. Culp was afraid. In fact, he was terrified, which made him very dangerous.

  President Roosevelt was breathing down his neck. It wasn’t only that TR was leading the Progressive reform attack against monopolies, oil and railroad trusts, and stock manipulation—all sources of Culp’s booming fortune—but down in the Isthmus of Panama, Teddy was “making the dirt fly,” digging the ship canal to connect the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. And he had vowed, as only Teddy could—loudly and publicly—to prosecute business men who profited illegally from his canal.

  Which, of course, Culp had—having financed a revolution to secure the route from friendly natives, rigged the Panama Canal Treaty to keep the canal out of the hands of those same natives, stolen millions from investors, and maneuvered Congress into paying millions more for canal rights that lined the pockets of Culp and his friends.

  Claypool’s lawyers and lobbyists were working round the clock to disarm the canal time bomb. But if the President ever discovered that J. B. Culp had also masterminded the notorious Ramapo Grab—a private water company swindle that had almost won out over then-Governor Roosevelt’s Catskill Aqueduct project—Teddy would not rest until Culp was in prison.

  So Claypool was not surprised that J. B. Culp wanted the President of the United States removed from office. Culp needed the President removed from office. Unfortunately, impeachment was not possible. TR might exasperate and TR might unsettle, but even voters who didn’t love him were at least fascinated, and two-thirds of the Senate was not was about to rile them by kicking out the President they had elected fair and square.

  All of which meant that J. B. Culp wanted the President dead. As Culp’s behind-the-scenes fixer, it was Brewster Claypool’s job to find someone to kill him, while separating them from the crime by layer upon layer of isolation.

  Unless he could talk Culp out of it.

  Claypool nursed the whiskey until the glass was bone-dry, and he had almost given up hope when, at last, Culp lumbered in and loomed over his chair. He was a big man who used his bulk to intimidate.

  “What are you waiting for?”

  “An opportunity to talk sense. Would you please sit down?”

  “My mind is made up. The man must go.”

  Claypool rose to his feet. “May I point out that he’s not just a man. He is the President of the United States.”

  “I don’t care if he’s the King of England. Or the bloody Pope. Or the Almighty Himself. He will destroy us if we don’t get rid of him.”

  “Is there no other way?”

  Culp repeated, “Theodore Roosevelt will destroy us if we don’t get rid of him.”

  9

  “Look out, Mr. Bell!” the Van Dorn front desk man telephoned Isaac Bell in the detective bull pen. “Opera singer coming at you! I had to release the electric lock before she broke down the door.”

  Coloratura soprano Luisa Tetrazzini, the “Florentine Nightingale,” burst into the bull pen and embraced Bell. Despite the Knickerbocker’s steam heat, she was bundled in a coat, and her throat was swathed in an immensely long red scarf that trailed behind her. Her eyes were wild.

  “Isaac!” she cried in a voice trained to carry to the back of a five-hundred-seat house. “Where is Joseph?” Knickerbocker permanent residents like her and Caruso, several theater impresarios, and the Van Dorns, shared a sort of small-town neighborliness. People dropped in to visit, lingered in hallways, and addressed each other by first name.

  She was thirty-five years old, a shapely, Rubenesque dark-haired beauty with an expressive face, a love of drama, and a will of iron. She had made her American debut last year in San Francisco, before the earthquake. Caruso himself praised her voice and her acting. “Not yet a star,” he had told Bell when Bell described hearing her sing in San Francisco. “But soon! Mark my words. The world will kiss her feet.”

  “Joseph,” Bell answered, “is in Washington.”r />
  “But I am desperate. Look what they do.” She thrust a letter at him. “Open!”

  Bell recognized the paper. He unfolded it and saw what he expected, the now-familiar skull and dagger and the black hand. Mano Nera was stepping up in the world, first the helpless, then the well-off, now the famous.

  Bella Tetrazzini,

  Were our need not great, we never trouble such artist. But we have no choice. Four thousand dollars must fall in our hands and so we turn to you singing for great success at Hammerstein. Please, Bella Tetrazzini, prepare the money and wait for instruction. Must have before Thursday.

  With great respect,

  Your friends in need

  “Don’t be afraid,” said Bell, “we’ll—”

  “I’m not afraid! I’m angry.”

  “When did you get this?”

  “Twenty minutes ago. In the afternoon mail.”

  “Is this the first you’ve received?”

  “Two last week. I thought it make joke.”

  “Do you have them?”

  “I burned them in the fire. Isaac, I need guard. I’m going to sing in San Francisco again. For the earthquake victims.”

  “When do you leave?”

  “Tomorrow. I think maybe I should not be alone with only my maid. I need Van Dorn guard.”

  Bell thought fast. His Black Hand Squad was up and running, though with no clients, the White Hand Society having terminated their contract. The hunt for Russo, the blaster, had shifted west from St. Louis. The Van Dorn Denver field office was looking for him in the mining camps. Russo could well be heading for San Francisco, which had a large Italian colony.

  He fingered the letter. Definitely the same paper.

  “Helen?” he called out. “Where’s Helen Mills? There you are. This is for the Secret Service. Take it to Agent Lynch. Wait a minute. Helen? . . . Excuse me, Luisa, I will be right back.” He led his intern away from the desk, out of earshot. “What’s that bulge?”

  “What bulge?”

  Bell pointed. “That.”

  In her family’s Dupont Circle mansion, Bell had seen Helen wear the latest styles of one-color, single-piece shirtwaist suits. Here, she wore the traditional young office girl’s separate shirtwaist tucked into a trumpet skirt.