Thunder City

by Loren D. Estleman

  Harlan rose from the rocking chair. He supposed there wasn’t room for a fainting couch. “What are you going to call your little tin tub?”

  “Search me,” Ford said. “Whatever’s next.”

  The Pinkerton man’s name was Dibble. He wore Norfolk jackets with a belt in back and affected the British accent that would have been his by right if his mother, who was born in Chicago, hadn’t bundled him away from his father’s house in Mayfair when he was three years old and taken him to live with her sister two blocks from the Union Stockyards. At twelve he had run away from the stink and the tyranny of a household run by women, intending to stow away on a ship bound for England, but had got only as far as Toledo, where a conductor on the B&O threw him off a freight car. A week after that a man named Ryan collared him on an Erie dock eating a raw fish he’d stolen from a market. Ryan was a Pinkerton detective who earned money in his spare time beating up sneak thieves for the local merchants’ association and tipping them unconscious into the water, to sink or swim as the fates dictated. He was also a pederast who fed and sheltered young Dibble in return for his sexual favors. This arrangement continued for two years, until Ryan choked to death on his own vomit in bed one night when he was too drunk to roll over; or so the coroner ruled at the inquest that followed.

  For his own amusement, Ryan had related to the boy all the details of his work with the agency. Two days after the man’s death, Dibble, wearing a suit he had stolen from a gentlemen’s emporium, applied for an apprentice position at Pinkerton. The personnel interviewer was not taken in by the boy’s assertion that he had passed his eighteenth birthday, but was sufficiently impressed by his knowledge of the detecting trade to employ him part-time as a file clerk. From time to time he was selected to carry messages to and from operatives engaged in surveillance work, and upon occasion to take one’s place while he went for a walk or to relieve his bladder. At the age of sixteen he was installed in a permanent post as detective.

  That was fifteen years ago.

  His particular skill involved dealing with members of the serving class. “People talent” was looked upon as of equal value to the agency as an aptitude for forensics or for following people undetected; “Gentleman John” Stiles was celebrated for his ability to blend in with blue bloods and ambassadors, and no one got on better with pickpockets and second-story men than “Fishbait” Rudge, who had spent nine months undercover in the Ohio State Penitentiary worming the whereabouts of a cache of stolen securities out of his cellmate. “English Eddie” Dibble’s background and accent, which leaned toward the cockney, bought him confidences from stable hands, assistant cooks, and chambermaids that no amount of official threats or kindly condescension could. When the agency succeeded in locating Agnes, the maid whom Clara Ford was anxious to interview on the subject of her relationship with Clara’s husband, Henry, it was Dibble who talked the terrified woman into returning to Dearborn.

  When the director of the Toledo office summoned him to report to Detroit and the home of James Aloysius Dolan, Dibble was unaware that his success with Agnes was the reason he had been selected. The little brown spick who answered the door had admitted him without speaking, and led him, rocking from side to side as if his feet hurt, to a modest-size room on the ground floor, where he was left alone for ten minutes.

  It was the kind of place Dibble hated on sight. Shelves of books of a legal and papist nature mocked his impatience with literature of any kind. He felt intimidated by the presence of a massive painting, presumably of his host, and the lingering pungent evidence of cigars he could not himself afford to smoke. The Englishman in him (and his nightmarish memories of Ryan) distrusted anything Irish on the face of it. Finally, he disliked any assignment that took him out of Toledo and away from his small but comfortable flat, which he had decorated in an English manner, with tea things and a photographic portrait of King Edward.

  Dolan entered at last, shaking the detective’s hand and shrinking the room with his girth and personality. Dibble, who stood just below medium height, resented having to crane his neck to look up at his client. Big men were comfortable and confident everywhere they went. They behaved as if they had never been compelled, at the end of a belt with a square brass buckle, to kneel before a man and unbutton his fly. He was relieved when Dolan lowered himself into the huge winged swivel behind his desk and indicated the armchair drawn up in front. The leather was porous and supple, not like the cheap top-grain that covered the one comfortable chair in his flat. He noticed that he had not been offered refreshment, but he was used to that; the years he had spent relating to people of a certain station had left their mark. His hosts simply never thought of it.

  “You know Sal Borneo?” Dolan began.

  “No, sir.” The polite address was endemic, and for years now had not required effort to sound sincere. He spoke the truth. He had never heard the name.

  The Irishman nodded, as if that was the answer he had expected, and flipped open the black pebbled cover of a folder on the blotter before him. Dibble recognized it as the kind in which agency files were passed from office to office. They were never to be removed from the building. Dolan’s eyes roamed over the typewritten sheets with a speed that suggested he had already read the material in detail. He stopped reading and abruptly shut the folder, resting his big hands on top of it. His eyes were as blue as Lake Erie. “Henry Ford.”

  “Ah.”

  “You spoke to the maid.”

  “I did.”

  “Did she tell you anything you didn’t put in your report?”

  “No, sir. I never hold out on the agency.” Again he did not lie. Employees who withheld information for purposes of extortion were prosecuted ruthlessly. Dibble’s loathing for authority was not sufficient to overcome his lifelong fear of it.

  “Are you good with your hands?”

  “Sir?” He stiffened.

  “I mean, can you fix a shutter, prune a bush, oil hinges? Are you handy around the house?”

  “I suppose I am.” He had hung his own wallpaper and rewired a lamp he had bought secondhand that resembled one he remembered from his father’s house.

  “I want you to go to work for Ford, at his house. I want you to find out if there are any more maids like Agnes. They don’t have to be maids, if I’m after making myself clear.” Dolan lifted his brows like an instructor coaching a not-very-promising pupil.

  “Yes, sir. Do I report to you or Mrs. Ford?”

  “To me. Mrs. Ford knows nothing about this, nor do I wish her to.”

  “How long am I to stay?”

  “Until I tell you to leave.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  They worked out a plan for the reporting sessions, after which Dibble rose, shook Dolan’s hand again, and returned to his room at the Railroad Hotel. On the way he bought a bottle of cheap port to brighten his mood. It might be a long time before he found himself back in his little piece of the sceptered isle in Toledo.

  Couzens found Ford in his bathroom in the house on Edison Street, stretched out on his back on the tile floor in his shirtsleeves to relieve an ache caused by too many hours spent sitting in the rocker on Piquette discussing the new design with Joe Galamb.

  “I just got off the telephone with Durant.” Couzens stood in the doorway with his hands in his pockets and his derby on the back of his head. He looked more like a circus barker than ever.

  “Bill Durant?”

  “None other. He wants to set up a union with Buick and Reo, Olds’s new company. International Motors, he calls it. He’s inviting us in.”

  “What’s he offering?”

  “Three million.”

  “He can do better than that.”

  “How much better?”

  Ford thought. “Eight.”

  “Million?”

  “If it’s all cash.”

  “Maybe he knows something,” Couzens said. “He’s close with that Selden crowd.”

  “Tell him I’ll throw in my lumbago.”

/>   “If we lose in court we might not even get the three million.”

  “We won’t lose.”

  chapter fifteen

  The Payoff

  FIRST-TIME VISITORS TO THE home of Sal Borneo—and these were few, as the sanctity of his hearth was not to be violated with matters of business except under the most special circumstances—were always surprised to learn that the Detroit Italian community’s leading citizen did not live in royal splendor. Fabulous stories had been told of the house of his predecessor, Uncle Joe Sorrato; stories of Persian rugs and tables laden with silver and a phonograph in every room, gifts from indebted admirers and mostly stolen from J. L. Hudson’s and homes on Jefferson Avenue, but Borneo’s four small rooms on the fifth floor of a building that had survived the spectacular fire of 1886, while comfortable, were no more opulent than the flat of a successful butcher. He had not even a study to himself, but read Virgil and Gibbon in inexpensive editions in an old chair in the parlor while his daughter sat on the floor memorizing verses for the sisters, and took his meals with her and his wife, who was also their cook, at a table in the dining room with a lace cloth made by Signora Borneo’s grandmother. The kitchen was furnished with a woodstove and an icebox, and a fine old four-poster bed, a wedding gift from Vito Grapellini, left barely enough space in the bedroom for the drawers to be slid from the chest containing the husband’s shirts and the wife’s petticoats. Grapellini himself had an electric refrigerator and pump-up gasoline stove in his house on Heidelberg and played Caruso records on a wind-up Parlograph. Residents of Little Italy who heard of the Spartan arrangement at the Borneos’ were inclined either to doubt the testimony of the witness or to conclude that Sal Borneo was not the man of influence they had thought.

  At the time these disappointing stories began to be told, a joint passbook account in the name of Salvatore and Graziella Bornea at the Detroit Savings Bank reported a balance of $2,069.24. Two safety-deposit boxes in the vault of that same institution rented in the name of “Salvatore Bornea, Butcher,” contained one hundred twelve thousand dollars in cash denominations of singles, fives, tens, twenties, and fifties. Some of the smaller bills still stank of the sweat of the men who had earned them in the stove foundries and carriage shops and spent them in Borneo’s horse parlors and brothels. It was a comfortable sum to have amassed at a time when the average laborer earned less man a thousand dollars per year, but Borneo was dissatisfied. He desired money not for the comforts it bought (for to these he was as insensate as it was said the Duke of Wellington had been to the flavor of a rotten egg), but for the variety of its uses, and a hundred thousand was no more sufficient to this purpose than a carpenter’s box half filled with tools of limited utility. The men who made things move, the Vanderbilts and Carnegies and John Jacob Astors, had millions at their disposal. He smiled at their marble libraries, their forty-room houses and mistresses girdled with diamonds, all the absurd outward ornamentation of their wealth upon which they spent so much time and money as if they needed to be reminded of it every time they read a book or opened their eyes or experienced an erection; but he envied them their monopolies. The sight of Jupiter Pierpont Morgan’s red infected nose on Wall Street was rumored to have had a more positive effect upon a New York Stock Exchange in crisis than had the victory in Cuba, while a negative twitch of John D. Rockefeller’s palsied head over a bit of ticker tape was all that was required to bring down the economy of a small Central American country. These men had never pumped their fists for the rights of the common man on a platform draped in bunting, nor leaned down from a caboose to shake a calloused hand that might one day check a box next to their name on a ballot, yet everything they did and said affected the lives of populations. Such might did not come from two locked boxes in the basement of a bank in Detroit.

  And they were ruthless men; insatiable in their appetites, determined in their destiny, insensible to the misery of the men they ruined, the families they impoverished, the progressive ideals they crushed because they held no relevance to the bright steely light that awakened them in the night and beckoned them forward. In this they differed not at all from the lessons Borneo had learned in Little Italy, the philosophy of brutality and betrayal that had enabled him to survive in the New World. But the men were regarded differently because they were Dutch and English and French. More important, they were Not Italian. A quarter century earlier, two men named Fisk and Gould, stock marketeers and railroad men, had sought to buy up all the gold in the United States and set their own price for its sale, and in so doing brought about the Panic of ’73 and a nationwide recession. They had stood trial for it, and were lightly punished, but were feted as great robber barons and inundated with invitations to Fifth Avenue balls and to speak before great crowds for huge considerations; although their audiences were the smaller for the absences of the suicides they had caused. Conversely, in 1891, seven years after Borneo came to America, a corrupt and bigoted Irish police superintendent was murdered in New Orleans, some said by Black Handers; after a jury acquitted eight Italians who had been charged with the crime and hung on three others, a mob dragged the defendants from the courthouse, lynched two, and shot the others to pieces. Theodore Roosevelt, then climbing the political ladder in New York, referred to the incident as “a rather good thing.”

  The episode had left a deep impression on Borneo, who at the time had been recovering in bed from his police interrogation in the matter of the assault upon the barber Gilberto Orosco. A man could rape a continent and win admiration, provided his name ended in a consonant or at least an acceptable vowel, but an Italian, like a Negro, could not take a billiard cue even to one of his own without jail and suffering even unto death. Better, then, to exert influence anonymously, through the popular anointed, and thereby gradually acquire the funds necessary to exert true power.

  The process, however, seemed glacial. He was nearing the end of his second decade of enlightenment, and his dominion was small enough that he could survey it in its entirety by standing upon a chair on the terrace of the restaurant where he conducted most of his business. As much as it amused him to ridicule Big Jim Dolan for pandering to the unwashed and illiterate voters whose caprices determined the fate of his party, Borneo did not delude himself; the man was his superior in all the ways that counted. The Irish Pope was comfortable everywhere he went in the city, except of course the Italian neighborhoods, but even there his safety was assured by his celebrity. Borneo had only to journey west of Gratiot Avenue to feel his power shuck from his body; on Belle Isle, in Corktown, among the stately homes along Jefferson, and in any of the smart shops and varnished saloons that lined Woodward he was just another dago, forced to step into the gutter to make way for flying wedges of Detroit College students too caught up in their self-worship to watch where they were blundering. Resistance would only change their brainless banter to roars of indignation, followed by kicks and blows. Apart from his interest in the glory of old Rome, he took no particular pride in his nationality, which was a fractious thing even among those who did, the various cities and provinces of home having been at one another’s throat since the fall of Constantinople. The oafs who gathered on the Campus Martius on Columbus Day, draped in green-white-and-red sashes and hooting above the bass drums and tubas about the contributions Italians had made to America since that Genoese opportunist had dropped anchor off Porto Rico in 1492, left him cold. Not by sermons and pageantry had the Spanish (and then the French and then the English and finally the Irish) gained sway over those who had preceded them to these shores, but by raw force, whether it was pressed by muskets or cavalry or a truncheon in the hands of a mick fireman “maintaining the peace” on election day. (The Dutch, of course, had used money, which as Borneo had already observed was the most fearsome weapon in the human arsenal.) In any case it was difficult enough for any man, let alone a dusky Mediterranean, to grope his way along the corridors of power without having to bring his whole tribe.

  He had the vision, the beginnings o
f an organization, and the start-up funds to brave that corridor. All he lacked was a vehicle to speed the journey. It had amused him to apply that term literally and lend funds to young Crownover, fully expecting the impetuous Ford to fail spectacularly, as he had twice before, and leave the heir to the great carriage company in Borneo’s debt. It pained him to admit that he had underestimated Ford. Although the business of the Selden patent was encouraging, his own small victory over the American justice system in the Orosco affair, which he, an insignificant street tough, had won through an embarrassingly transparent device, had left him with little faith in the ability or even the determination of the law to enforce itself. Ford was fast approaching the millions necessary to become an authentic force, one with the Morgans and Carnegies and Astors and Vanderbilts and Rockefellers, immune to conscience and statute. Borneo had not yet surrendered hope, but neither was he oblivious to the call of fresh opportunity.

  All this he considered as he stood by the window in his dining room, peering through the diaphanous lace of his wife’s curtains at his neighborhood in full cry of the early-evening rush to home and supper. The flow of pushcart peddlers wheeling home their inventory, salesgirls with felt hats and handbags, and round-shouldered men carrying lunch buckets, some of them balancing these burdens with shiny aluminum-covered pails containing beer from the corner taproom, was as changeless and reliable as a punch clock, but almost always had a warp in it at the corner, which had become the post of choice for every type of unemployable to pitch his party line. Sometimes he was a scruffy-headed Marxist in wire-rimmed glasses and a filthy and tattered sweater, host to any number of lively vermin, reading the Communist Manifesto in the bored singsong voice of a streetcar conductor. Other times he was a minister with some unidentified church, gaunt and shrill in the wrinkled white suit and Panama hat of a tropical missionary, asking the workers as they passed if they were aware their daughters were under the scrutiny of white slavers like naked geese strung heads-down in the window of a market. On occasion, what appeared to be the same stout woman in a dirty frock with the same ageless and barefoot children wiping their noses on her skirts held that ground, snatching the odd sleeve and asking if anyone had seen her husband. There were others, more transient, with missions less apparent, who came but once or twice, but always left, like the others, when the traffic thinned to a trickle, with or without a handful of sweaty coins to show for their vigil. Some of the recidivists lived in the neighborhood; these Borneo knew by name. The rest were drawn from outside by the rapidly expanding Italian population. The minister, he was aware, slept in a boxcar in the railroad yard when he failed to collect enough to pay for a room, and he suspected the woman with the children made the rounds of all the other ethnic communities the rest of the time. By and large these individuals were looked upon as minor annoyances and ignored by the policeman who walked that beat, except at election time when healthy arraignment activity was desired by the party in office. The diehards were released after a few days with a warning and were back on the corner within a week. Out-of-towners who looked even slightly shabby were beaten with stiff rubber hoses, transported by police van to the city limits, and advised not to return on pain of three months’ hard labor on charges of vagrancy. No distinction was made between the authentic hoboes who had ridden in on the rods and those with ticket stubs in their pockets to show that they had entered respectably enough in a day coach. A factory town did not warm to strangers with time in the middle of the day to pester its hardworking citizenry.