Bell looked around, gradually aware that he was in a bed that smelled of strong soap. A kaleidoscope was whirling in slow motion. Through it, he saw grave doctors, in modern white coats, and a nurse, glowering at Marion, the only non-medico in the room. He said, “Something tells me we won’t be enjoying the night in a hotel.”
“Probably not tonight.”
“We’ll see about that.” Bell moved his hands and feet, and stretched his arms and legs, and turned his head to face the doctors. “As far as I can feel, my brain is in working order, and I still have the same number of limbs I was originally issued. Can you tell me why I’m in your hospital?”
“This is the first you’ve sat up and spoken in eight days.”
Bell felt the room shift a little bit, as if the bed was set on a creaky turntable. “I’d been feeling the need for a rest. Looks like I got it.”
“Do you remember anything that happened before you lost consciousness? Any detail, no matter how small? Any—”
“The floor sank under me and the roof caved in.”
“Do you remember why?”
“Are the boys O.K.?”
“Your squad dug you out.”
Bell looked at Marion. She nodded. “They’re all O.K.”
The doctor said, “Do you remember why it happened?”
“Because Antonio Branco pulled another fast one—about the fastest fast one I’ve ever run into.” He turned to Marion. “Did the boys catch him?”
“He got away from Detective Edwards last week in the Jersey City yards.”
“A week? He could steal rides anywhere in the country in a week.”
“Or charter a special,” said Marion. “Detective Edwards told me Branco swindled a banker and a wine broker out of fifty thousand before he left.”
The bed shifted again. Bell had a feeling it would do this for a while, in fits and starts. The doctors were staring at him like a monkey in a bell jar.
“Events,” Bell told them, “are coming back in a rush. I want you to move me to a quiet, semi-dark room where I can talk them out with my fiancée, Miss Morgan.”
Marion leaned closer and whispered in his ear. “Are you really all right?”
Bell whispered back, “See if you can get them to send up a cold bird and a bottle of bubbly . . . Wait!”
“What is it, Isaac?”
“I just realized . . . Marion, get me out of here! Wire Joe Van Dorn. I don’t care if he has to spring me at gunpoint . . . I just realized, Branco wouldn’t have shoved a knife in Claypool’s chest if Claypool hadn’t already admitted his boss was Culp.”
Snow pelted the glass at Raven’s Eyrie, where Antonio Branco luxuriated under a fur counterpane in a princely guest room attached to the gymnasium. It was far from the main house. Culp’s wife had moved to their New York mansion for the winter season. The servants who had brought him supper the night they returned from Scranton, and breakfast the morning after, were a pair of bruised and battered prizefighters. Culp said they could be trusted.
“Mr. Culp is waiting for you in the trophy room,” one of them told him after breakfast.
A nailhead-studded, Gothic-arched, medieval fortress door guarded the trophy room, which was as big as a barn—two stories high and windowless—and lighted by electric chandeliers. Mounted heads of elk, moose, and bison loomed from the walls. Life-size elephant, rhino, Cape buffalo, and a nine-foot grizzly bear crowded the floor. Tiger skins lay as carpet. Doors and alcoves were framed with ivory tusks.
J. B. Culp stood at a giant rosewood desk that was flanked by suits of medieval armor. Mounted on the wall behind him were hunting rifles and sidearms. He indicated a large, comfortable-looking leather armchair that faced his desk. Antonio Branco stayed on his feet.
“Sleep well?”
“I thank you for your hospitality.”
“You didn’t give me any choice.”
“A dead president can’t prosecute you.”
“So you said on my train.”
Branco said, “And the private aqueduct will be yours.”
“The pot sweetener,” Culp said sarcastically. But he was, in fact, deeply intrigued. The blackmailing Italian had a doozy of a scheme to take control of the Catskill Aqueduct—dams, reservoirs, tunnels, and all—that just might work. A second shot at the Ramapo Grab.
“You’ve had the night to think about your opportunity,” said Branco. “What is your answer?”
“The same,” Culp said coldly. “No one dictates terms to me.”
“You can continue your wonderful life,” said Branco. “And I can make it even more wonderful for you. The aqueduct will be only the beginning. I will help you in all your businesses.”
Culp said, “You can count on the fingers of one hand the men in this country richer than I am, and none are as young. I don’t need your help.”
Branco said, “I will eliminate labor problems. I will eliminate your rivals. I will eliminate your enemies. They will disappear as if you wave a fairy’s wand. A coal strike in Colorado? Sabotage in Pittsburgh? Reformers in San Francisco? Radicals in Los Angeles? Anywhere you are plagued in the nation, I will un-plague you.”
“Just out of curiosity, what will all this ‘un-plaguing’ cost me?”
“Half.”
Culp pretended to consider it. “Half of everything you help me make? Not bad.”
“Half of everything.”
“Everything? Listen to me, you greasy little dago. I don’t need you to get things I already own.”
“You need me to continue enjoying the things you own.”
Culp’s face darkened. “You’re offering to be partners and you are blackmailing me.”
“You are correct.”
Culp laughed.
“You laugh at me?” said Branco. “Why? In this arrangement, I take all the risks. The police can’t walk into your mansion with guns blazing. They’ll shoot the ‘greasy dago.’ They will never shoot Mr. John Butler Culp.”
“I’m laughing at your nerve.”
Branco stared at the man lounging behind his desk. Was Culp so insulated, so isolated from the world, that he was ignorant of the danger, the threat, Branco posed? A strange thought struck him: Or was Culp a man above ordinary men?
“Wouldn’t you do exactly the same if our positions were turned upside down?”
“I sure as hell would,” said Culp. “Exactly the same.”
“Malvivente.”
“What’s that dago for?”
“Gangster.”
J. B. Culp beamed. He suddenly felt as free as a hoodlum stepping out on Saturday night, with brilliantined hair, a dime cigar, and a pistol in his pocket. Anything could happen. He thrust out his hand.
“O.K., partner. Shake on it.”
Branco said, “I would very much like to shake your hand. But I can’t.”
“Why not? I thought you wanted a partner.”
“You put us at risk.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Your prizefighters know too much.”
Culp raised his voice. “Lee! Barry! Get in here.”
They entered quickly. Too quickly.
“Were you listening at the door?”
They exchanged looks. Barry tried to bull through it. “Sure we was listening. You’re alone in here with this guy. We gotta make sure you’re O.K.”
John Butler Culp reached back and took a Colt Bisley .32-20 target pistol from the wall of guns. He fired once at Barry. The heavyweight sagged to the floor with a hole the diameter of a cigarette between his eyes.
Lee gaped in disbelief.
Culp fired again.
Then he said to Branco, “Get rid of the bodies, partner.”
31
Skeletons were scattered like pick-up sticks. The half of the graveyard nearest the
church was still a timeless patch of headstones poking out of green grass, but the explosion had churned the rest into muddy earth and jumbled bones. Above it rose a mountain of bricks and timbers, all that remained of three five-story tenement buildings and Antonio Branco’s grocery warehouse.
Isaac Bell surveyed the destruction from a roof across Prince Street. The Mayor had put the Health Department in charge of removing rubble to search for bodies. Scores of city workers were digging, shifting, and loading their finds into wagons.
“How,” Bell asked, “did the gas penetrate three entire buildings before it exploded?”
The tall detective was flanked by explosives expert Wally Kisley and Gang Squad chief Harry Warren. They hovered at his elbows, braced to grab hold if he fell over. Bell shrugged them off and took a long, hard look.
Branco’s Grocery had occupied two lots, fifty feet of street frontage. Three side-by-side tenements, each twenty-five feet wide, measured another seventy-five feet. The explosion had leveled one hundred twenty-five feet of buildings and fifty feet of graveyard. As Kisley had put it when Bell walked out the hospital’s back door, “One hell of a bang.”
Now, looking down from the rooftop, Kisley did not sound entirely comfortable with his explanation about the scale of destruction. “Thing is, Isaac, they build tenements in rows, several at a time. The walls are made of brick, but they leave man passages so the workmen can move easily between them. When they’re done building, they fill the holes with scrap material and lightly plaster them over. Not much to stop gas from seeping through.”
“How did Branco set it off and escape with his life?”
“Could have left a timing device to spark it off. Could have laid a fuse.”
Bell turned to Harry Warren. “I want you to investigate where and how Branco’s legitimate businesses connected to the underworld.”
“I’ve been looking at that ever since you first brought it up,” said Warren. “I still can’t find a single complaint about fraud or extortion. Branco ran his grocery business clean as a whistle.”
Kisley interrupted. “It’s like he was two entirely different people: a crook, and a choirboy.”
“Then why didn’t the crooked outfits attack him?”
“Only one thing would stop them,” said Warren.
“Fear,” said Bell.
Warren nodded emphatically. “Somehow, lowlifes knew better than to mess about with Branco.”
“But if no one ever saw him with crooks, how did he give orders? He controlled gangs: Black Hand gorillas, drug smugglers, and counterfeiters. For that matter, how does he command them now while he’s on the run?”
“I don’t know, Isaac.”
Another question puzzled Bell.
“Why did he blow up the building?”
“He ambushed us.”
“No. He could not know precisely the moment we were going to break down his door. He just got lucky with us charging in, just like we got lucky not getting killed . . . And if you guys don’t let go of my elbows I’ll break your arms! I’m fine . . . Why did he blow it up?”
“To hide evidence.”
“What evidence? I already had him dead to rights at the Singer Building. He planned this ahead of time. He was ready to run when he had to.”
Bell traced, again, the long line of destruction, the mound of rubble that had been Branco’s store, to the taller heap of the tenements, down to the graveyard, and past the uprooted bones. The church itself was unscathed. Even its stained glass windows were intact. He still thought it remarkable how far the gas traveled.
“I want to know who owned those tenements . . . Keep greasing Health Department palms. Slip some of our boys onto their pick and shovel crews. Get a close look at everything they dig out. And call me the instant I can inspect what’s left of Branco’s cellar.”
“Enrico,” said Isaac Bell when he lured Caruso to the Knickerbocker’s cellar bar for a glass of champagne, “you’re Italian.”
“Guilty,” smiled the opera singer. “But, first, I am Neopolitan.”
“Let me ask you something. What drives a Sicilian?”
“A hundred invasions. Countless tyrants. They’ve triumphed by their wits for three thousand years. Why do you ask?”
“I’m reckoning how Antonio Branco thinks.”
“Sicilians think for themselves—only themselves.”
“When I asked Tetrazzini on our way to San Francisco, she called them ‘bumpkins from down south.’ Primitive peasants.”
“Never!” Caruso roared, laughing. “Tetrazzini’s from Florence, she can’t help herself. Sicilians are the direct opposite of primitive. They are sophisticated. Strategic. Clear of eye, and unabashedly extravagant. They see, they understand, they act—all in a heartbeat. In other words—”
“Never underestimate them,” said Bell.
“There isn’t a law written they don’t despise.”
“Good,” said Bell. “Thank you.”
“‘Good’?”
“Now I know what he’ll try next.”
“What?” asked Caruso.
“Some unsuspecting bigwig is about to get a Black Hand letter. And it will be a Black Hand letter to end all Black Hand letters.”
Archie hurried into the bar. Peering through the gloom of Caruso’s cigarette smoke, he spotted Bell, and whispered urgently, “Research says Branco owns the shell company that controls the shell company that owns the tenements next door to his grocery.”
32
The Health Department laborers excavating the Branco’s Grocery wreckage went home at night, leaving only a watchman in charge now that the bodies of all the missing had been removed. Wally Kisley and Harry Warren bribed him. They stood guard at the burned-out stairs that had descended from Branco’s kitchen to the cellar.
Isaac Bell climbed down a ladder with an up-to-date tungsten filament flashlight powered by improved long-lasting, carbon-zinc dry cell batteries. He played its beam over a tangle of charred timbers and broken masonry and was surprised to discover a back section had somehow withstood the collapse of the building’s upper tier.
The flashlight revealed the walls of a room that was still intact. It was a remarkable sight in the otherwise chaotic ruin. The mystery was solved when Bell saw a square of vertical iron bars that had supported the ceiling. The bars formed what looked like a prison cell. Then he saw a hinged door and lock and realized that it was indeed a jail cell or holding pen. Installed by labor padrone Branco to enforce contracts? Or by gangster Branco to show rivals who was boss?
He found another open space of about the same dimensions beyond a mound of debris. It had no bars, but the walls were solid steel, and the door, which was open, was massive, a full eight inches thick. A walk-in safe.
Bell stepped inside.
The cash boxes were empty. He saw no ash in them; the money hadn’t burned but had left in Branco’s pockets. Bell thought it curious that the gangster had fled well-heeled yet risked arrest by taking the time to defraud banker LaCava and the wine broker. A reminder that Branco was the coolest of customers.
The safe’s walls were pockmarked. Twisted metal and charred wood littered the floor. Exploding ammunition had destroyed Branco’s cache of shotguns and revolvers. Those explosions, or the original gas explosion, had buckled and shifted the back wall of the safe. It hung at a drunken angle, and when Bell looked closely, he saw another set of hinges. A door—an odd thing to find in what should be an impregnable wall.
His light began to fade. “New and improved” aside, it was still only a flashlight and couldn’t last for long. He switched it off, to conserve the D cells, and felt the hinges with his hands. There was definitely a door at the back of the safe.
Bell gripped the edge with both hands and pulled it inward. Then he switched the light on again and peered behind it. All he could see was thickly packed debr
is, brick, wood, and plaster. Just as he doused the flashlight again to conserve the last of its power, he glimpsed a roughhewn stone wall rimming both sides of the door and he realized he was looking into what had been an entrance cut into the basement of the tenement building behind Antonio Branco’s grocery.
“Now we know,” Isaac Bell told Kisley and Warren, who were waiting at the top of the ladder, “how the gas traveled so far before it exploded. And also why Branco blew it up. It hid some kind of underground passage that ran from his place, beneath those tenements, and into the graveyard.”
“What’s in the graveyard?”
“Give the watchman more money and borrow three shovels.”
The Van Dorns picked their way across the fallen tenements, following narrow, twisting corridors burrowed by the Health Department, and emerged through a final shattered foundation. The graveyard was lit dimly by a few tenement kitchens that overlooked it and a stained glass clerestory at the back of the church.
Bell led the way over the rough earth that the explosion had plowed. The bones he had seen from the Prince Street roof had been gathered into an orderly row of coffins. The odor of fresh-sawn pine boards mingled with the pungent soil. The church and the surrounding tenements blocked street noise, and it was so quiet he could hear the whir of sewing machines in the apartments overhead.
Where the plowed ground met the grass, he said, “We’ll start here.”
Two feet down, their shovels rang on brick.
They moved back, off the grass, onto the raw earth, and dug some more.
“My shovel hit air!” said Wally Kisley. An instant later, he yelped out loud and disappeared. The ground had opened up. Bell leaped into the hole after him and landed on top of him in the dark.
“You O.K., Wally?” The explosives expert was getting too old for tumbling.
“Tip-top, when you get off me.”
Harry Warren landed beside them. “What have we here?”
Bell switched on his flashlight. “It’s another tunnel.”
The Gangster Page 19
