Hell Gate

by Jeff Dawson

  Finch had located the grave at first light. It was new and well-tended with a small stone marker and cut turf that had yet to bed in fully. It stood back off one of the many paths that wound gently through the greenery and overhanging yews and lindens and maples; past the eclectic, ostentatious crypts and mausoleums that sat amid the carpet of everyday headstones.

  Ensconced in his position, he had simply sat and waited till, as the noise of traffic rose, the working day beginning, a young woman, probably aged in her late 20s, wandered over to crouch down by the grave in question.

  She picked off some leaves, then lay a bunch of purple irises before touching the headstone and hanging her head in silent contemplation. Then she stood up and smoothed down her long grey skirt, gave one last lingering gaze, before turning back to the path. Finch wondered when it might be socially acceptable to go and speak with her and waited till she had left the grave and was on her way back up to the main gate.

  ‘Mrs Kimmel?’ he asked, trying to strike a gentle tone. ‘Mrs Frances Kimmel?’

  She spun round as if his words carried threat. She had an attractive face, but with hair pulled back tightly, presenting herself as deliberately plain, he thought – unsurprising given the circumstances. There was a steely determination – an anger – behind the soft hazel eyes.

  ‘Are you police? A reporter?’ she asked.

  ‘Neither.’

  ‘Well, whoever you are, I don’t have time… I need to get to the factory.’

  He moved up ahead of her.

  ‘Please…’

  She went to sidestep him.

  ‘I have two fatherless kids to look after… and not a red cent from my husband’s employer.’

  He followed her, acutely cautious of not wanting to harass her or to cause a scene of any kind. In the absence of a hat of his own, he’d taken to wearing a crumpled black felt gambler that he’d found. He removed it demonstrably.

  ‘Mrs Kimmel, I’m truly sorry to approach you like this, and forgive the intrusion, but it’s the only place I could think of to find you. I remembered mention of this cemetery. Believe me, if there were another way…’

  She marched on with purpose, trying to rid herself of him.

  ‘Please. You must hear me out. The work your husband was doing. I believe I can follow it up. Show that he didn’t die in vain.’

  She stopped and turned.

  ‘Who are you? You’re not from around here… Your accent…’

  An elderly couple came down the path, nodding politely as they passed, though clearly sensitive to some kind of discord. He waited till they were out of earshot. He kept his voice low.

  ‘I’m a British agent working with the NBI… or at least elements of the NBI I hope I can trust. My name is Collins, Bradley Collins.’

  He thought he registered a slight flicker of curiosity. She threw a glance to his filthy, tattered clothes. He handed her his worn passport and she glanced at the details. He’d done his best to wipe off the blood.

  ‘You don’t look like Secret Service.’

  She strode on again.

  ‘Please, I must ask—’

  ‘Don’t overplay your hand, Mr Collins.’

  ‘Mrs Kimmel. I’m sorry. I need to know. Your husband. Did he ever talk to you about his work?’

  She stopped a second time.

  ‘And why am I supposed to suddenly trust you?’

  ‘I have no proof of my honesty. All I can tell you – with hand upon heart – is that the people who killed your husband, they tried to kill me too. I’ve been on the run.’

  ‘Please. Just go away. I’m warning you now I can holler pretty loud.’

  ‘Here…’

  ‘What?’

  He grabbed her hand and pressed the silver snuff box into it. She regarded it with bewilderment.

  ‘Where… Where did you get this?’

  She stroked it lovingly.

  ‘From someone who was there. Someone who saw it.’

  ‘You know about that? What they did to him?’

  ‘They were going to kill me the same way. The same grisly ritual… I was fortunate… I escaped…’

  She looked around. There was no one in view. Still she kept her voice down.

  ‘In answer to your question, no… not officially.’

  ‘The question?’

  ‘You asked whether he talked about his work. But sometimes, my Eloysius, it was hard for him not to keep things secret – you know… names, his whereabouts. Plus, he talked in his sleep…’

  She tucked the snuff box in her skirts and snapped out of her sentimentality.

  ‘But you need to tell me why you need to know.’

  Finch shuffled his feet.

  ‘Look, I’ll try and explain, it gets complicated… But what if I tell you that I know your husband was a very brave man. He had put his life on the line investigating the financial dealings of a gangster named Manny Muller.’

  The name had power enough for her to put a halt to their conversation there and then.

  ‘I can’t say any more. Good day to you, Mr Collins.’

  She bustled on her way. He followed.

  ‘Please, you must…’

  ‘Muller’s not someone anyone should cross. I hear they got Angus too. He was a good man. And now I have to live with the thought of that bastard Muller every day—’

  She hitched up her skirts to walk faster.

  ‘—bankrolling politicians, presenting himself as some do-gooder, some great American patriot…?’

  Her anger was such that she almost broke into a run.

  ‘Please, Mrs Kimmel. There are other names. Did you ever hear of any of these – an anarchist group called Black Flag? Maybe a “shooting club”…?’

  She said nothing.

  ‘A company called Herulian Holdings? A man named Delgado…?’

  She stopped once again and, this time, spat on the ground. She fixed his eyes with her own. The anger burnt in them.

  ‘What do you know about Delgado?’

  Finch took a deep breath. He’d budgeted for non-cooperation or, at best, reluctance. He was exposing himself more and more, though his instinct told him she was trustworthy.

  ‘I’m pretty sure Delgado, a rogue NBI agent, betrayed your husband, blew his cover, leading to his death. He – Agent Kimmel – had worked his way in deeply within Muller’s organisation and found out some important things, incriminating things – things that could still be used to bring Muller to justice.’

  She laughed, disdainfully. It wasn’t saliva this time but a word she spat out.

  ‘Justice…? Where was justice for my Eloysius? He had to be sewn back together. No open casket for him. The police wouldn’t go near Muller. He’s got half of the NYPD in his pocket.’

  ‘But not all of them,’ Finch protested. ‘I myself was interrogated at Centre Street by a Detective Copeland. He seems cut from the same cloth as MacLeish, a friend of his. Possibly a friend of your husband’s also…?’

  She shrugged. He wasn’t sure if her ignorance was genuine.

  ‘Maybe there’s hope yet?’

  ‘Hope?’

  ‘Look, up till now, Muller had always been able to present himself as a legitimate businessman, someone of civic standing, enough to act as a backer… a patriotic benefactor to Senator Schultz of the American National Party…’

  She gave a snort of derision at that name too.

  ‘But what I also believe to be true is that Muller is securing a substantial part of his funds through a trade in illegal narcotics. Not just that but foreign narcotics, stuff he has to import. If there’s one thing Washington won’t buy, it’s that – the fact that not just organized crime, but German-sponsored organized crime, is financing Schultz’s likely run at the White House. This isn’t just some local police matter but something way bigger… something worthy of Federal investigation and Federal indictment.’

  She said nothing for a moment and Finch wondered whether he’d done the very thing that
she’d just warned him about – overplaying his hand.

  ‘You’re asking the right sort of questions,’ she replied. ‘Yeah, sure I heard of Herulian Holdings. Black Flag too. Herulian was something Eloysius was investigating. But you’re not asking the question.’

  She pointed to an impressive monument, a grand-looking obelisk mounted upon a square plinth. It reminded him to a degree of the banks of the Thames and Cleopatra’s Needle.

  ‘I have to go…’ she said.

  She gestured to some great chimney stacks that had begun belching soot.

  ‘Domino… the sugar refinery.’

  And with that, she hurried off.

  Finch could not keep harassing her. It was highly improper. All he could do was let her go, watching as she stomped off up the path to finally disappear through the grand Gothic arches of the cemetery’s entrance gates.

  He walked over to the obelisk. It marked the final resting place of a Union hero of the Civil War, ‘b. September 24, 1826 – d. April 14, 1894’.

  Henry Warner Slocum… General Slocum.

  Chapter 25

  The wind whipped up as Finch walked back over the elevated promenade of the Brooklyn Bridge, the threat of rain again in the air. The growing metropolis in all its living, steaming, cacophonous glory was stretched out before him. It was no surprise that New York City was the powerhouse of a titular ‘Empire State’. If empires were about conquest, power and the pursuit of riches, then this – Washington Irving’s fabled ‘Gotham’ – was an exemplar, riven with the same corruptive and Machiavellian politics of all the others throughout history.

  Tired, cold, aching and hungry, Finch’s head was still reeling from what he had just learned. Mrs Kimmel’s reference to General Slocum could mean only one thing – the passenger boat… the one that had caught fire last summer and whose death toll had decimated the German community on the city’s Lower East Side.

  He reached Gramercy Park and walked the genteel side streets where nannies pushed perambulators, servants scrubbed steps and crocodiles of children were being led to kindergarten.

  He was still in his filthy, smelly clothes – garments that had once hung on an Indiana farm clothes line. He wondered what kind of madness had led him across the Atlantic, across the States. Service to his country? His country hadn’t served him well at all. It had put a gun to his head.

  Poor Sammy, in his final hours, had referred to something shameful that Black Flag had been asked to do, a job for hire, and for which their payment, their reward, had been a batch of heroin – Muller’s heroin. It had already been established that the group were involved with bomb-maker Jimmy Chang, someone who had known them well enough to fraternize with them at their commune. Black Flag’s leader, Max Sheldrake, had frequently hushed Sammy’s loose lips, but the poor boy’s dying words had got to the nub of it – ‘incendiary device’.

  Agent Kimmel clearly knew what was afoot. He had got in deep with Muller’s organization only to be rumbled, probably betrayed – almost certainly by Delgado. Detective MacLeish had begun putting the pieces together by himself but had met with a similarly grisly fate.

  The fact seemed inescapable… No matter how hard he pushed it away, it all came back to one overriding probability – that Muller had commissioned the firebombing of the passenger ship General Slocum. To serve his own ends, he had wilfully brokered the deaths of the men and, in the main, the women and children of Germantown, well over a thousand of them. Politics had no scruples. Finch had long abandoned any notion of nobility on that score a long, long time ago.

  But this…?

  As unthinkable as it might be – as profound the tragedy – it made perfect sense. The Slocum Disaster had engendered a state of instant victimhood on the part of New York’s German–American community. A vulnerable people needed hope, needed purpose, needed salvation, needed leadership.

  It had put them in Muller’s pocket. That was a powerful commodity – a hugely charged one – to manipulate to his own ends. Or, by using the fig leaf of civic responsibility, to offer up to a Senator, a would-be President, one who was already whipping up and playing upon nationalist sentiment amongst America’s huge German-immigrant population. Schultz’s success would bring Muller, the kingmaker, great power and influence – and protection – in return.

  Was Senator Schultz in on it too? Nothing should be discounted.

  Conjecture was one thing. Proving all this – attempting to prove all this – was, thus far, a guaranteed sentence of death… a slow, agonizing, protracted death. And with the police, the NBI, even MO3 not worthy of full trust, who the hell would he prove it to?

  In his own mind, Finch still had some kind of credit with the Black Flag anarchists and could at least use time with them to uncover more information. He would have to explain where the pair of them had got to for the remainder of the night but believed he could bluff his way out of it – Sammy, after all, had a penchant for going out, sneaking around. Plus, they needed to know the solemn fact – that he was now dead.

  Or did they even care? He began to doubt it himself.

  As he turned the corner, his mind was made up for him. There, outside the Proctor residence, were several New York Police Department officers, and they were manhandling the ragtag remnants of the Black Flag gang, hands on heads, into three Black Marias. The muslin curtains of the neighbours were twitching. The more adventurous had come out onto their stoops to watch, no doubt with relief. Sheldrake was yelling something about oppression and revolution to an officer whose level of political engagement amounted to casually whacking him on the back of the head with his truncheon before shoving him inside.

  There is more law at the end of a policeman’s nightstick than in a decision of the Supreme Court.

  The neighbours enjoyed that too. Finch ducked back out of sight and pondered as to whether the raid had come as a result of the discovery of Sammy’s body, or if Black Flag’s number was simply up. It, surely, had only been a matter of time? Although they would jump to the inevitable conclusion that it was he who had ratted them out, especially after having stolen his passport back… maybe even killed Sammy himself. It was a line they still might peddle to the police.

  There was now only one thing for it – to find the only person who could possibly understand.

  * * *

  Finch stood on the corner of Christopher Street. He remembered what Lady Brunswick had said, that, in the morning, she left her neat Georgian house to go for a stroll and buy fresh-cut flowers. It took a while but, a little after ten o’clock, Katia appeared, in a deep burgundy dress. Unfortunately, she was accompanied by two muscular-looking men, Muller’s goons, wearing crombie coats and derby hats, who followed just a few feet behind.

  If Katia were playing a part then she did so magnificently – the stoic, icy exterior betraying nothing of the emotional tumult she must be going through. Muller’s Ford stood at the kerb. He had not yet left to conduct his shameless, nefarious business.

  There was no way Finch could get to Katia, he knew; no means to converse directly; so he followed, hanging back some 20 yards, bobbing and weaving and crossing the roads back and forth so as not to arouse suspicion. She soon turned onto Greenwich Avenue with its pedestrians and street traffic and the florist’s store up ahead on the corner.

  And then Finch saw it – so cleverly and artfully done amid the activity, that her escorts did not have a clue. There was a brick wall, an old one, crumbling slightly, with some of the mortar having fallen out. She brushed her hand against it, lightly, just for a second. You had to look hard, but as he passed the spot, Finch saw the folded piece of paper pushed deep into the crack. It was the ‘dead drop’, the point of communication with Deuxième Bureau.

  The exterior of the florist’s store was festooned with brightly coloured bouquets, blooming nicely in their baskets and buckets. The two men stood outside and lit up cigarettes as she entered. But he would not be able to speak to her without attracting attention. He lingered by the window b
ut she didn’t look out.

  He doubled back on himself and hurried, as best he could, to the end of Christopher Street. He saw the trio re-enter the house, Katia now armed with a large bunch of daffodils. There was nothing then but to wait.

  He found a discarded New York Times in a waste bin and half watched the door while flipping through ‘all the news that’s fit to print’ according to the newspaper’s covenant – something not evidenced by its obvious editorial bias.

  American newspapers were a curious beast – so very similar to British, or indeed European ones, yet so very different. On Fleet Street, without question, the papers were just as subject to the political prejudices of their proprietors, but news was still news, regardless of geography, not split into domestic and ‘world’, with the latter reported almost as an afterthought. It seemed strange that the ongoing Russian Revolution, an event of potentially seismic proportions, should receive just a few lines of coverage.

  Maybe it was fear of contagion. Domestic affairs were rife with court rulings on labour laws and word of a massive and deadly violent Teamsters’ union strike that was now underway in Chicago. Another new socialist movement had been founded in the same city, Industrial Workers of the World. Mob rule and demagoguery were meat and drink to the likes of Senator Schultz.

  It took over an hour, during which time he’d read every item, including a baseball report – of the New York Giants’ walloping of the Boston Beaneaters at the Polo Grounds, something he didn’t fully understand but appreciated for its poetry. Eventually, the front door opened and Muller and the two goons got into the red Ford and drove off. Approaching by the main entrance was not an option. Instead, Finch moved up the alleyway that ran behind.

  They hadn’t fixed the gate. It still hung off its hinges. Having staked out the rear of the property, scanning for movement, he determined that the only activity came from the study on the first floor – the room where she had shot North stone dead. It had a small balcony – more for show than anything practical. He didn’t know how but, with a flood of adrenaline, he found himself climbing the drainpipe.