The Gangster (25 page)

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.”

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 debris, 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.”

They followed it for twenty feet in the direction of the church and came to a door set in a massive masonry foundation. Bell, who had a way with locks, jimmied it open. His flashlight died. Kisley and Warren lit matches. They were in a crypt, stacked with caskets.

The crypt had another door, opposite the one they had entered. Bell jimmied it open and they found themselves in a narrow, low-ceilinged passage between mortuary vaults. A bare electric light bulb hung from the ceiling at the far end, illuminating a flight of stone steps.

Bell whispered, “Wally, you cover me here. Harry, go back out, around the corner, and watch the front of the church.”

Bell mounted the steps.

He cracked open a door at the top and peered into the church. Despite the late hour, there was a scattering of worshippers
kneeling in the pews. The front door was closed to the cold. The altar and choir seats were empty. Candles flickered in an alcove on the other side of the pews. There, an old woman in a head scarf waited her turn at a confessional booth, and nothing looked different than Bell would expect in an ordinary church in a city neighborhood.

He stepped back from the door and turned to start down the steps. Then he saw what looked like a cupboard door: a narrow slab of hinged wood. It was not locked. He turned sideways to fit his shoulders through the opening and stepped up into a cramped space that had a bench and grillwork that admitted light. He sat on the bench and looked through the grille into a similar booth. It had an open door through which he could see a black velvet rope that blocked the entrance from the pews.

Bell had already figured out that he was sitting inside a confessional booth. But it took a moment to orient himself. This was not the confessional where the old woman waited in the alcove across the pews but another in a corresponding alcove on his side. He sat there a few moments, pondering what it meant. The door to his side was closed. He was in the booth where the priest listened. Suddenly, a man scurried into the alcove and stepped over the rope.

With his broken nose and mangled ear, he could only be Vito Rizzo of the Salata Gang. Rizzo hurried into the booth beside Bell’s and closed the door, and Isaac Bell realized that Antonio Branco was an even a greater twisted genius than he had imagined. Branco commanded his gangsters from this booth at the end of the tunnel between his store and this church. They “confessed” in complete secrecy, and he offered “absolution” in
complete secrecy. Best of all for the mastermind, the gangsters never saw their Boss’s face.

Rizzo was trembling. He looked terrified. He spoke, suddenly, in Italian.

Isaac Bell drew his gun.

But why was the hard-as-nails gangster so scared? Because, Bell realized, Rizzo was new to this. This might be only his second “confession” since his boss Salata was killed. Only his second direct contact with a mysterious boss.

Bell pressed his handkerchief to his lips.

“Talk American,” he muttered.

Through the grille, he saw Rizzo’s eyes widen with surprise. But Bell had guessed right. Rizzo was too scared to question his boss. “O.K. I know good American. Forgive me, Father, I sinned . . . I’m sorry I missed confession last week. The cops were after me. So I didn’t get your orders . . .”

“Go on.”

“All I know is, Salata’s dead. I don’t know who takes over.”

“You,” said Bell.

“Thank you! Thank you, padrone—I mean, Father. Thank you, I’ll do good, I promise . . . Can I ask ya something?”

“What?” said Bell.

“There’s funny talk on the street about the Branco store blowing up. Does this have anything to do with us?”

“You tell me.”

“I don’t know. I hear maybe Branco is Black Hand. Is that so?”

“What if he is?” asked Bell.

“I don’t know.”

Bell let silence build between them. Rizzo started fidgeting, tugging his mangled ear. Bell spoke suddenly.

“Did you do what I told you last?”

“Yes.”

“Tell me what you did.”

“I did what you said.”

“Tell me
exactly
what you did.”

“I went to Storm King. I opened a saloon. I got my keys scaring the pick and shovel men. And all that time I waited for the guy to come with the sign.”

“What sign?”

“The sign you said to look for.”

“Which?”

“The one you said. The pay token with the mark.”

“Did he come?”

“Yeah. I did everything he told me.”

“Where is he now?”

“I don’t know.”

“What do you mean you don’t know? I told you to stick close.”

“No you didn’t.”

Bell let a silence build. Rizzo broke it.

“You told me to do what he said. I gave him what he wanted. I ain’t seen him since.”

“What did he want?”

“Clothes, food, stick of dynamite.”

“You must know where he went.”

“I don’t know.”

“When did he come?”

“Four days ago.”

“And you haven’t seen him since?”

“No. He left.”

Bell sat silent. He had learned a lot, though hardly enough. But he doubted that Rizzo knew any more. The “guy with the sign” could be Branco or not, but even if he was Branco, Rizzo couldn’t find him. Still, not a bad night’s work, and Bell decided he had to act as if Branco was attempting to make contact with J. B. Culp. For if he was, President Roosevelt was still in danger.

It was time to shift his Black Hand Squad up to Storm King.

“What do you want me to do, Boss?”

“I want you to raise your hands.”

“What?”

“My son, twelve inches from your head is the muzzle of a .45 automatic.”

“What?”

“Raise your hands.”

“What did you say?”

“In your fondest prayers, it won’t be a flesh wound. Elevate!”

“Who are you?”

“Bell. Van Dorn Agency.”

The Black Hand gangster shouted a string of curses.

Bell sprang from his booth, threw open the confessor’s door, and pressed his gun barrel inside Rizzo’s good ear.

“Such language in church!”