The Gangster (23 page)

A switch engine headlamp swept the siding. The beam blazed on a shock of white hair, and Antonio Branco recognized Isaac Bell’s Black Hand Squad detective Eddie Edwards, his face aflame with vengeance. Branco rolled off the roof, slid down the ladder, and sprinted after the Queen of the Valley.

The flyer was picking up speed even as it lumbered through
countless switches that were shunting it from rail to rail out of the yard and toward the main line. He heard the detective give chase, boots ringing, running after him full tilt like a man who knew as well as Branco the treacherous footing of tracks, crossties, gravel, and ankle-snatching gaps beside switch rails.

Running as hard as he could, Branco pulled ahead of the lead baggage car, jumped for a handrail, and hauled himself onto the platform between the front of the car and the locomotive’s tender. A brakeman was hiding there in the dark, his lantern unlit, lying in wait for hobos. He swung the lantern, threatening to brain Branco with it, and shouted, “Get off!”

When caught, a hobo was expected to jump off as ordered: Go try to steal a ride on some other brakeman’s train. To resist was to bring down the wrath of the entire crew. But Branco was trapped. The Van Dorn detective was right behind him and catching up fast.

“Get off!”

The brakeman swung his lantern. Branco grabbed it, pulled hard, and used the man’s momentum to yank him across the platform and off the blind.

The brakeman flew out of the dark, straight at Eddie Edwards in a blur of pinwheeling limbs. Edwards was not surprised. Brakemen often rode hobo patrol on baggage car platforms, rousting tramps, until their train was out of the yard, and Antonio Branco had proven repeatedly he was no ordinary tramp.

The detective dodged a boot and ducked under a heavy lantern that passed so close to his skull that it knocked his hat off. The train was accelerating, the engineer unaware of the drama behind him. Edwards put on a desperate burst of speed. He pounded alongside the blind. At his feet, a switch appeared out of nowhere. He cleared the yawning slot by a miracle and swung onto the blind, one hand on a grip, the other clenched in a fist for Branco.

The platform was empty.

He looked up. Branco had climbed onto the roof.

Grabbing ironwork, Edwards jumped onto a hand-brake wheel, muscled his way up between the front of the baggage car and the tender, and hauled himself onto the sloping end of the roof.

The roof was empty.

He whirled his head, thinking Branco was on the tender about to smash him with a lump of coal. But the tender was empty, too. He looked down at the empty blind. Where had the gangster gone? Only one place. Off the train. He must have jumped out the other side of the blind, back into a yard full of rail cops and angry detectives.

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.

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 hemisphere.”

“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.”