The Black Hand

10

We were coming out of our door the next morning when we heard the loud, braying voice of a street vendor a few streets away. We did not get many out here in Newington. I would not have noted it in passing, but Barker’s ears are more acute than mine, or perhaps he was listening for it. It made him turn and follow the voice to its source. At the corner of Brook Street, there stood a hokey-pokey man with his cart.

There were two of them, to be precise, a man in his fifties and a boy no more than twelve. The man was alternating between offering his wares and singing snatches of Verdi. He was talented enough to have attracted a handful of people so early in the morning.

“He is too well dressed to be a hokeypokey man,” Barker commented.

The man had a heavy mustache, black hair going gray at the temples, and wore an elegant frock coat. He did not touch the ice cream at all but left the messy work to the boy, a cheerful lad with a halo of black curls and sleeves rolled to the elbows.

“Could he be training the boy?” I ventured.

“It is rather early in the day for ice cream and too much of a coincidence that he should appear on a corner so close to our home.”

“Tutti-frutti!” the man bawled. “Italian ices. Ecco poco, only a little!”

“Gigliotti runs most of the ice cream vendors in London, because he holds a monopoly in the ice trade here. The Neapolitan is only one of his enterprises.”

“What sort of criminal activities is he involved with?” I asked.

“Merely those that ensure his monopoly stays a monopoly. Any attempt to start a rival business is run off.”

“Are you going to speak to this fellow?”

“He’s not breaking the law, Thomas.”

“Gentlemen!” the man called out to us from across the street. “May I interest you in a bowl of cold ice cream on this warm morning?”

“Not at the moment, thank you, sir,” Barker answered, raising his hat.

The Italian broke into song again, while my employer turned into Newington Causeway. The incident left me with an unsettled feeling. It seemed to me that the man had sinister intentions, but then it’s easy to feel that way in the middle of a case. The pair could be no more than they appeared, ice cream vendors, but, in my opinion, the Italian looked just like the sort of man who could plan and operate a Sicilian takeover.

“Is he one of Gigliotti’s men, perhaps?” I asked.

“I find it no more comforting to think he’s a Camorran than a Sicilian. Let us be cautious, lad, and keep an eye on this corner either way.”

“What if the Serafinis had become a hindrance to Gigliotti and he has bigger plans?” I asked. “What if we can’t find the Sicilian leader because he does not, in fact, exist?”

Barker looked at me for a moment or two. “Now you’re thinking like an enquiry agent, Thomas.”

“Is it possible?”

“Aye, ’tis. But there are other scenarios that are equally possible.”

“For example?” I challenged.

“Suppose the Sicilians were actually hired by Mr. K’ing or the Irish criminal Seamus O’Muircheartaigh, who has a good quarter of the East End in his pocket. This may all be an attempt to wrest control from Gigliotti’s grasp.”

“My word,” I said. “I hadn’t thought of that.”

“And it could just as easily be something else we haven’t thought of.”

“That’s comforting,” I replied.

“Come, lad, we have an appointment,” Barker said.

“With whom, sir?”

“Mr. Dalton Green. He is in charge of the East and West India docks until a successor for Sir Alan is found.”

My employer hailed a cab with one of those piercing whistles of his. We were taking quite a number of hansoms, I noted, wondering if the Home Office could afford such extravagances.

“So has Dr. Vandeleur ruled that Sir Alan was murdered or not?” I asked once we were seated and rolling through Lambeth.

“Lad,” he replied solemnly, “you really need to read the newspapers every morning, rather than mooning about, ingesting coffee by the bucketful. There is a world out there with events of more than passing interest.”

“Sorry, sir.”

“If you had, you would have already discovered that he ruled that the death was due to natural causes. It was his only option, really. Claiming that Sir Alan was murdered without ironclad proof would create a scandal that would have certainly cost Vandeleur his position. The gentry doesn’t like unwelcome news. All the same, Vandeleur takes his work very seriously and must have hated to bring a false report.”

“So he did the next best thing,” I said. “He told you. This is just the sort of bee Vandeleur knew would get in your bonnet. He could soothe his conscience by knowing that you’d taken over the case.”

“Unfortunately, he has given me little to work with. Pray give me some quiet to come up with an appropriate ruse.”

Neither of us spoke for the rest of the journey. I wondered if the hokeypokey man had concerned him more than he let on.

One smells the West India Docks before one sees them. The smell is not salt water or seaweed or damp, it is rum. The sweet odor pervades everything, so that one expects to see barrels broken on the quayside, instead of lined up neatly and sealed tight. We made our way to the dock offices, where Barker presented his card; and after a twenty-minute wait, we were shown in to Dalton Green. He was a corpulent, jowly man, as if he had been designed with a French curve. The windows were open, admitting a heady breeze, but there was a sheen of perspiration across the man’s brow.

“What can I do for you, Mr. Barker?” he said a trifle testily. “I can spare you but a few minutes.”

“Sir, I am investigating a case for a barrister whose client claims he was assaulted by a gang of Italian dockworkers.”

“Did the incident occur on the docks or out beyond the gate there?” Green nodded his head toward the stone gates separating the docks from the rest of Poplar.

“Just outside them, sir, in Bridge Road.”

“I don’t see that it is any of my concern, then,” he replied, waving a dimpled hand in dismissal.

“The District Council and the Tower Hamlets have received complaints of disruptions by Italian stevedores from these docks as far as Clerkenwell.”

“This is the first I’ve heard of it,” Green declared, as if information that didn’t reach his ear was either unimportant or downright erroneous. In this case, I knew it to be a total fabrication. “Were the men drunken?”

“No, sir. Organized. I understand it is either some sort of labor dispute or a matter between the various Italians. Had Sir Alan some trouble with them before he died?”

“He did, and now his problems have fallen into my lap. The Italians are willing to work for a wage that, frankly, the English workers won’t accept, but they have begun to demand a minimum number of working hours per day, which is madness, because we can’t guarantee the work. Ships arrive at their own pace. Some days they come in all day long, and other days the docks are empty for hours. I understand that they don’t like spending the entire day hoping work will pull up to the dock, but that’s the nature of maritime casual work. If we agreed to pay them for even three hours per day, it could ruin us if the freight doesn’t arrive.”

“Has there been some problem with the Sicilians?”

“Bloody dagos,” Green replied, loosening his collar in irritation. “They’re always at each other’s throats. The Sicilians think themselves a cut above the rest. They swagger about like they own the docks and are too concerned about slights upon their honor, as if wharf rats had any. Was it the Sicilians who attacked your barrister’s client?”

“There was that indication. Were there any reprisals being considered against the Sicilians in particular?”

“As a matter of fact, there was. Bledsoe was going to ban them from the docks entirely. He said the labor issues began when the Sicilians arrived. He thought them natural-born troublemakers and said as far as he was concerned, we could do without them altogether.”

“Do you know if he said so in front of them, or if he kept his opinions to himself?”

“Bledsoe was a very forthright man, Mr. Barker. It was his way to throw it back in their court, so to speak. ‘You shape up and quit causing trouble, or you can work elsewhere,’ he told them.”

Barker tented his fingers in front of him in thought. “Did he receive any threatening notes? They are generally stamped with a black hand.”

“I believe he did,” Green said. “He said the Italians were trying to frighten him, but that he ‘wunt be druv,’ as the Sussex folk say.”

“Might the note still be among his effects?”

“No. I watched him crumple it up in anger and throw it to the floor. I’m sure it was thrown away days ago.”

“Was there anything in his death,” Barker asked casually, “that might make you think it was not an accident?”

Green sat up. “Here now, what’s all this about? You’re the second chap to ask me that. The first was the coroner at the inquest. Is this something to do with Sir Alan’s assurance claim? Do they plan to contest it? His heart failed, and there’s an end to it. What does this have to do with a client getting coshed by a gang of dagos?”

Barker put up his hands. “I don’t work for an assurance company, sir. I’m merely trying to determine the size of the Italian presence on the docks and in particular the Sicilians among them.”

Green pulled back his chair and crossed to the open window. The rum-scented wind was pushing in the curtains on either side, and from where he stood he could survey the unloading of the ship. “I wish they were lazy workers, these Sicilians. Then I could sack them; but they are hard workers, even if they give themselves airs. Sometimes I wish we had all good, honest Englishmen on these docks like in the old days, but we can’t afford them anymore. The Poles, the Jews, the Chinese, the dagos-they get the work done faster and at less cost. They bring in profit, and when it comes to it, the numbers on the ledger sheet are what really matters. Are we done here?”

“Just one more question, sir. Is it possible I could speak to your foreman who works day to day with the Sicilians?”

“I suppose so. His name’s Ben Tillett. He’s a good man, though I don’t care for his politics. He should be around the docks somewhere.”

“Thank you for your time, Mr. Green. Come, Thomas.”

Outside, Barker passed through the gates and then stopped. He put his hands on top of the ball of his stick and inhaled slowly. I’d seen him do it before in our garden, while he was beginning his exercises. He was shaking off whatever he had been doing and preparing to take new impressions.

We watched the unloading of vessels in hope of seeing the Sicilians who had been causing so much trouble. They were not difficult to spot, for they all sported black cloth caps with short peaks. I also noticed that when compared with the Italians, the Sicilians looked thinner and harder, as if they’d seen more trials on that Mediterranean island than their brethren on the mainland. They seemed to have a preference for putting things in their mouths when not actually working, whether cigars, cigarettes, short pipes, or toothpicks. Somehow it made them look foreign and insolent. The Italians were trying to fit in with the other dockworkers, while the Sicilians stood out.

Most of the Sicilians were young, I had noticed, about my age. They could not work without making chafing remarks to their companions, even to ones across the dock. They had not come here to join a criminal organization, I thought, which they could have done in Sicily. No, they’d come because the opportunity to work and the living conditions were better in London than in Palermo. Working as casual labor was hardly ideal, however, if one was forced to wait all day and the work never arrived at the docks. In order to survive, some may have reluctantly stepped under the umbrella the Mafia offered. It was that or starve. For all of their bravado, none of the Sicilians looked well nourished, and I doubted anyone on our little island ever gave them a warm greeting or a full belly. Gallenga had said once one took the blood oath, one was bound for life, which meant forty or fifty more years of being indentured. That is, if they lived that long. To men like Faldo, I thought, these were the yeomen guard, the least trained, the most expendable, the first to be mown down in battle.