The Gangster

1

The Black Hand locked twelve-year-old Maria Vella in a pigeon coop on the roof of an Elizabeth Street tenement. They untied the gag so she wouldn’t suffocate. Not even a building contractor as rich as her father would ransom a dead girl, they laughed. But if she screamed, they said, they would beat her. A vicious jerk of one of her glossy braids brought tears to her eyes.

She tried to slow her pounding heart by concentrating on the calmness of the birds. The pigeons murmured softly among themselves, oblivious to the racket from the slum, undisturbed by a thousand shouts, a piping street organ, and the thump and whirr of sewing machines. She could see through a wall of wooden slats admitting light and air that the coop stood beside the high parapet that rimmed the roof. Was there someone who would help her on the other side? She whispered Hail Marys to build her courage.

Coaxing a bird out of the way, she climbed up on its nesting box, and up onto another, until she glimpsed a tenement across the street draped with laundry. Climbing higher, pressing her head to the ceiling, she could see all the way down to a stretch of sidewalk four stories below. It was jammed with immigrants. Peddlers, street urchins, women shopping — not one of them could help her. They were Sicilians, transplanted workers and peasants, poor as dirt, and as frightened of the authorities as she was of her kidnappers.

She clung to the comforting sight of people going about their lives, a housewife carrying a chicken from the butcher, workmen drinking wine and beer on the steps of the Kips Bay Saloon. A Branco’s Grocery wagon clattered by, painted gleaming red and green enamel with the owner’s name in gold leaf. Antonio Branco had hired her father’s business to excavate a cellar for his warehouse on Prince Street. So near, so far, the wagon squeezed past the pushcarts and out of sight.

Suddenly, the people scattered. A helmeted, blue-coated, brass-buttoned Irish policeman lumbered into view. He was gripping a baton, and Maria’s hopes soared. But if she screamed through the wooden slats, would anyone hear before the kidnappers burst in and beat her? She lost her courage. The policeman passed. The immigrants pressed back into the space he had filled.

A tall man glided from the Kips Bay Saloon.

Lean as a whip, he wore workman’s garb, a shabby coat, and a flat cap. He glanced across the street and up the tenement. His gaze fixed on the parapet. For a second, she thought he was looking at her, straight into her eyes. But how could he know she was locked inside the coop? He swept his hat off his head as if signaling someone. At that moment, the sun cleared a rooftop, and a shaft of light struck his crown of golden hair.

He stepped into the street and disappeared from view.

The thick-necked Sicilian stationed just inside the front door blocked the tenement hall. A blackjack flew at his face. He sidestepped it, straight into the path of a fist in his gut that doubled him over in silent anguish. The blackjack — a leather sack of lead shot — smacked the bone behind his ear, and he dropped to the floor.

At the top of four flights of dark, narrow stairs, another Sicilian guarded the ladder to the roof. He pawed a pistol from his belt. A blade flickered. He froze in openmouthed pain and astonishment, gaping at the throwing knife that split his hand. The blackjack finished the job before he could yell.

The kidnapper on the roof heard the ladder creak. He was already flinging open the pigeon coop door when the blackjack flew with the speed and power of a strikeout pitcher’s best ball and smashed into the back of his head. Strong and hard as a wild boar, he shrugged off the blow, pushed into the coop, and grabbed the little girl. His stiletto glittered. He shoved the needle tip against her throat. “I kill.”

The tall, golden-haired man stood stock-still with empty hands. Terrified, all Maria could think was that he had a thick mustache that she had not seen when he glided out of the saloon. It was trimmed as wonderfully as if he had just stepped from the barbershop.

He spoke her name in a deep baritone voice.

Then he said, “Close your eyes very tight.”

She trusted him and squeezed them shut. She heard the man who was crushing her shout again, “I kill.” She felt the knife sting her skin. A gun boomed. Hot liquid splashed her face. The kidnapper fell away. She was scooped inside a strong arm and carried out of the pigeon coop.

“You were very brave to keep your eyes closed, little lady. You can open them now.” She could feel the man’s heart pounding, thundering, as if he had run very far or had been as frightened as she. “You can open them,” he repeated softly. “Everything’s O.K.”

They were standing on the open roof. He was wiping her face with a handkerchief, and the pigeons were soaring into a sky that would never, ever be as blue as his eyes.

“Who are you?”

“Isaac Bell. Van Dorn Detective Agency.”

2

“Greatest engineering feat in history. Any idea what it’s going to cost, Branco?”

“I read in-a newspaper one hundred million doll-a, Mr. Davidson.”

Davidson, the Contractors’ Protective Association superintendent of labor camps, laughed. “The Water Supply Board’ll spend one hundred seventy-five million, before it’s done. Twenty million more than the Panama Canal.”

A cold wind and a crisp sky promised an early winter in the Catskill Mountains. But the morning sun was strong, and the city men stood with coats open, side by side, on a scaffold atop the first stage of a gigantic dam high above a creek. Laborers swarmed the site, but roaring steam shovels and power hoists guaranteed that no one would overhear their private bargains.

The superintendent stuck his thumbs in his vest. “Wholesome water for seven million people.” He puffed his chest and belly and beamed in the direction of far-off New York City as if he were tunneling a hundred miles of Catskill Aqueduct with his own hands. “Catskills water will shoot out a tap in a fifth floor kitchen — just by gravity.”

“A mighty enterprise,” said Branco.

“We gotta build it before the water famine. Immigrants are packing the city, drinking dry the Croton.”

The valley behind them was a swirling dust bowl, mile after mile of flattened farms and villages, churches, barns, houses, and uprooted trees that when dammed and filled would become the Ashokan Reservoir, the biggest in the world. Below, Esopus Creek rushed through eight-foot conduits, allowed to run free until the dam was finished. Ahead lay the route of the Catskill Aqueduct — one hundred miles of tunnels bigger around than train tunnels — that they would bury in trenches, drive under rivers, and blast through mountains.

“Twice as long as the great aqueducts of the Roman Empire.”

Antonio Branco had mastered English as a child. But he could pretend to be imperfect when it served him. “Big-a hole in ground,” he answered in the vaudeville-comic Italian accent the American expected from a stupid immigrant to be fleeced.

He had already paid a hefty bribe for the privilege of traveling up here to meet the superintendent. Having paid, again, in dignity, he pictured slitting the cloth half an inch above the man’s watch chain. Glide in, glide out. The body falls sixty feet and is tumbled in rapids, too mangled for a country undertaker to notice a microscopic puncture. Heart attack.

But not this morning. The stakes were high, the opportunity not to be wasted. Slaves had built Rome’s aqueducts. New Yorkers used steam shovels, dynamite, and compressed air — and thousands of Italian laborers. Thousands of bellies to feed.

“You gotta understand, Branco, you bid too late. The contracts to provision the company stores were already awarded.”

“I hear there was difficulty, last minute.”

“Difficulty? I’ll say there was difficulty! Damned fool got his throat slit in a whorehouse.”

Branco made the sign of the cross. “I offer my services, again, to feed Italian laborers their kind-a food.”

“If you was to land the contract, how would you deliver? New York’s a long way off.”

“I ship-a by Hudson River. Albany Night Line steamer to Kingston. Ulster & Delaware Railroad at Kingston to Brown’s Station labor camp.”

“Hmm… Yup, I suppose that’s a way you could try. But why not ship it on a freighter direct from New York straight to the Ulster & Delaware dock?”

“A freighter is possible,” Branco said noncommittally.

“That’s how the guy who got killed was going to do it. He figured a freighter could stop at Storm King on the way and drop macaroni for the siphon squads. Plenty Eye-talian pick and shovel men digging under the river. Plenty more digging the siphon on the other side. At night, you can hear ’em playing their mandolins and accordions.”

“Stop-a, too, for Breakneck Mountain,” said Branco. “Is-a good idea.”

“I know a fellow with a freighter,” Davidson said casually.

Antonio Branco’s pulse quickened. Their negotiation to provision the biggest construction job in America had begun.

A cobblestone crashed through the window and scattered glass on Maria Vella’s bedspread. Her mother burst into her room, screaming. Her father was right behind her, whisking her out of the bed and trying to calm her mother. Maria joined eyes with him. Then she pointed, mute and trembling, at the stone on the carpet wrapped in a piece of paper tied with string. Giuseppe Vella untied it and smoothed the paper. On it was a crude drawing of a dagger in a skull and the silhouette of a black hand.

He read it, trembling as much with anger as fear. The pigs dared address his poor child:

The rest of the threat was aimed at him:

“They still want the ransom,” he told his wife.

“Pay it,” she sobbed. “Pay or they will never stop.”

“No!”

His wife became hysterical. Giuseppe Vella looked helplessly at his daughter.

The girl said, “Go back to Signore Bell.”

“Mr. Bell,” he shouted. He felt powerless and it made him angry. He wanted to hire the Van Dorn Detective Agency for protection. But there was risk in turning to outsiders. “You’re American. Speak American. Mr. Bell. Not Signore.”

The child flinched at his tone. He recalled his own father, a tyrant in the house, and he hung his head. He was too modern, too American, to frighten a child. “I’m sorry, Maria. Don’t worry. I will go to Mr. Bell.”

3

The Knickerbocker Hotel was a hit from the day John Jacob Astor IV opened the fifteen-story Beaux Arts building on the corner of 42nd and Broadway. The great Caruso took up permanent residence, three short blocks from the Metropolitan Opera House, as did coloratura soprano Luisa Tetrazzini, the “Florentine Nightingale,” who inspired the Knickerbocker’s chef to invent a new macaroni dish, Pollo Tetrazzini.

Ahead of both events, months before the official opening, Joseph Van Dorn had moved his private detective agency’s New York field office into a sumptuous second floor suite at the top of the grand staircase. He negotiated a break on the rent by furnishing house detectives. Van Dorn had a theory, played out successfully at his national headquarters in Chicago’s Palmer House and at his Washington, D.C., field office in the New Willard Hotel, that lavish surroundings paid for themselves by persuading his clientele that high fees meant quality work. A rear entrance, accessible by a kitchen alley and back stairs, was available for clients loath to traverse the most popular hotel lobby in the city to discuss private affairs, for informants shopping information, and for investigators in disguise.

Isaac Bell directed Giuseppe Vella to that entrance.

The tall detective greeted the Italian contractor warmly in the reception room. He inquired about Maria and her mother, and refused, again, an offer of a monetary reward beyond the Van Dorn fee, saying, good-naturedly but firmly, “You’ve already paid your bill on time, a sterling quality in a client.”

Bell led the Italian into the working heart of the office, the detectives’ bull pen, which resembled a modern Wall Street operation, with candlestick telephones, voice tubes, clattering typewriters, a commercial graphophone, and a stenographer’s transcribing device. A rapid-fire telegraph key linked the outfit by private wire to Chicago, to field offices across the continent, and to Washington, where the Boss spent much of his time wrangling government contracts.

Bell commandeered an empty desk and a chair for Vella and examined the Black Hand extortion letter. Half-literate threats were illustrated with crude drawings on a sheet of top quality stationery.

Vella said, “It was tied with string around the stone they threw in the window.”

“Do you have the string?”

Vella pulled a strand of butcher’s twine from his pocket.

Bell said, “I’ll look into this, immediately, and discuss it with Mr. Van Dorn.”

“I am afraid for my family.”

“When you telephoned, I sent men to 13th Street to guard your home.”

Bell promised to call on Vella that afternoon at Vella’s current construction site, an excavation for the new Church of the Annunciation at 128th Street in Harlem. “By the way, if you notice you are being followed, it will only be that detective… there.” He directed Vella’s gaze across the bull pen. “Archie Abbott will look out for you.”

The elegantly dressed, redheaded Detective Abbott looked to Vella like a Fifth Avenue dandy until he slid automatic pistols into twin shoulder holsters, stuffed his pockets with extra bullet clips, sheathed a blackjack, and loaded a shotgun shell into his gold-headed walking stick.

Isaac Bell took the Black Hand letter to Joseph Van Dorn’s private office. It was a corner room with an Art Nouveau rosewood desk, comfortable leather armchairs, views of the sidewalks leading to the hotel entrances, and a spy hole for inspecting visitors in the reception room.

Van Dorn was a balding Irishman in his forties, full in the chest and fuller in the belly, with a thick beard of bright red whiskers and the gruffly amiable charm of a wealthy business man who had prospered early in life. Enormously ambitious, he possessed the ability, rare in Bell’s experience, to enjoy his good fortune. He also had a gift for making friends, which worked to the great advantage of his detective agency. His cordial manner concealed a bear-trap-swift brain and a prodigious memory for the faces and habits of criminals, whose existence he took as a personal affront.

“I’m glad for any business,” said Van Dorn. “But why doesn’t Mr. Vella take his troubles to Joe Petrosino’s Italian Squad?”

New York Police Detective Joseph Petrosino, a tough, twenty-year veteran with an arrest and conviction record that was the envy of the department, had recently received the go-ahead from Commissioner Bingham to form a special squad of Italian-speaking investigators to fight crime in the Sicilian, Neopolitan, and Calabrese neighborhoods.

“Maybe Mr. Vella knows there are only fifteen Italians in the entire New York Police Department.”

“Petrosino’s got his work cut out for him,” Van Dorn agreed. “This ‘Black Hand’ plague is getting out of control.” He gestured at a heap of newspaper clippings that Isaac Bell had asked Research to gather for the Boss. “Bombing fruit stands and burning pushcarts, terrorizing poor ignorant immigrants, is the least of it. Now they’re tackling Italian bankers and business men. We’ll never know how many wealthy parents quietly ransomed their children, but I’ll bet enough to make it a booming business.”

Bell passed Van Dorn the Black Hand letter.

Van Dorn’s cheeks reddened with anger. “They actually address the little girl! What scum would frighten a child like this?”

“Feel the paper.”

“Top quality. Rag, not pulp.”

“Remind you of anything?”

“Same as the original ransom note, if I recall.”

“Anything else?”

“First class stationery.” He held it to the light. “Wonder where they got it. Why don’t you look into the watermark?”

“I already put Research on it.”

“So now they’re threatening his business.”

“It’s easy to make an ‘accident’ at a construction site.”

“Unless it’s a feint while they take another shot at his daughter.”

“If they do,” said Bell, “they’ll run head-on into Harry Warren’s Gang Squad. Harry’s blanketed 13th Street.”

Van Dorn showed his teeth in a semblance of a smile. “Good… But how long can I afford to take Harry’s boys off the gangs? ‘Gophers’ and ‘Wallopers’ are running riot, and the Italians are getting bolder every day.”

“A dedicated Van Dorn Black Hand Squad,” said Bell, “would free your top gang investigators to concentrate on the street gangs.”

“I’ll think about it,” said Van Dorn.

“We would be better fixed to attack the Black Hand.”

“I said I’d think about it.”

Isaac Bell strode uptown from the 125th Street subway station through a neighborhood rapidly urbanizing as new-built sanitariums, apartment blocks, tenements, theaters, schools, and parish houses uprooted Harlem’s barnyards and shanties. He was a block from 128th Street, nearing a jagged hill of rock that Giuseppe Vella was excavating for the Church of the Annunciation, when the ground shook beneath his feet.

He heard a tremendous explosion. The sidewalk rippled. A parish steeple swayed. Panicked nuns ran from the building, and Convent Avenue, which was surfaced with vitrified brick, started to roll like the ocean.

Bell had survived the Great Earthquake in San Francisco only last spring, awakening suddenly in the middle of the night to see his fiancée’s living room and piano fall into the street. Now, here in Manhattan, he felt his second earthquake in months. A hundred feet of the avenue disintegrated in front of him. Then bricks flew, propelled to the building tops by gigantic jets of water.

It was no earthquake, but a flood.

A river filled Convent Avenue in an instant.

There could be only one source of the raging water. The Croton Reservoir system up north in Westchester supplied New York City’s Central Park Reservoir via underground mains. The explosion in Giuseppe Vella’s excavation — an enormous dynamite “overcharge,” whether by miscalculation or sabotage — had smashed them open. In an instant, the “water famine” predicted by Catskill Aqueduct champions seemed unbelievable.

A liquid wall roared out of Convent Ave and raced down it, tearing at first-story windows and sweeping men, women, and horses around the corners and into the side streets. Its speed was startling, faster than a crack passenger train. One second, Isaac Bell was pulling the driver from a wagon caught in the ice-cold torrent; the next, he himself was picked up and flung into 127th Street. He battled to the surface and swam on a foaming crest that swept away shanties the full block to Amsterdam Avenue.

There the water careened downhill, following the slope of the land south. Bell fought out of the stream and dragged himself upright on a lamppost. Firemen from a nearby station were wading in to pull people out.

Bell shouted, “Where are the water gates?”

“Up Amsterdam at 135th.”

Bell charged up Amsterdam Avenue at a dead run.

A third of a mile north of the water main break, he found a sturdy Romanesque Revival brick and granite castle. The lintel above its iron doors was engraved WATER DEPARTMENT. A structure this big had to be the main distributing point for the Westchester reservoirs. He pushed inside. Tons and tons of Croton water were surging up from a deep receiving chamber into four-foot-diameter cast-iron pipes. The pipes were fitted with huge valve wheels to control the outflow to the mains breached seven blocks away by the explosion.

Bell spotted a man struggling with them. He hurtled down a steel ladder and found an exhausted middle-aged engineer desperately trying to close all four valves at once. He was gasping for breath and looked on the verge of a heart attack. “I don’t know what happened to my helper. He’s never late, never misses a day.”

“Show me how to help!”

“I can’t budge the gates alone. It’s a two-man job.”

With the dynamite explosion no accident, thought Bell, but a coordinated Black Hand attack to blame Giuseppe Vella for flooding an entire neighborhood, the extortionists must have left the helper bloodied in an alley.

“This one’s frozen.”

Isaac Bell threw his weight and muscle against the wheel and pulled with all his might. The old engineer clapped hands on it, too, and they fought it together, quarter inch by quarter inch, until the gate wheel finally began to turn with a metallic screech.

“Godforsaken Italians. I warned them again and again not to use too much dynamite. I knew this would happen.”

As soon as they closed the last gate, Isaac Bell raced back to Vella’s excavation.

The streets were littered with the corpses of drowned dogs and chickens. A dead horse was still tied in a wrecked stable. Trolleys had stalled on their tracks, shorted out by the water. The cellars of houses and businesses were flooded. A hillside had washed away and fallen into a brewery, and the people who had lived in the upended shacks were poking in the mud for the remains of their possessions.

An angry crowd was gathering at the excavation site.

Bell shouldered through it and found Giuseppe Vella barricaded in the board shack that housed his field office.

“Russo ran away.”

“Who is Russo?”

“Sante Russo. My foreman. The blaster. He was afraid those people would blame him.” Bell exchanged a quick glance with Archie Abbott, the Van Dorn shadow he had assigned to protect Vella. Abbott had managed to station himself near the door, but he was only one man and the crowd was growing loud.

“But it wasn’t Russo’s fault.”

“How do you know?”

“Russo ran to me a second after the explosion. He said he found extra dynamite in the charge. He disconnected the detonator. But while he was coming to tell me, it exploded. The Black Hand reconnected the wires.”

Policemen pushed through the crowd.

Bell said, “Soon as the cops calm them down, I’ll escort you home.”

The cops pounded on the door. Bell let them in.

They had come for Vella. Accompanying them was an angry official from the city’s Combustibles Department. He revoked Vella’s explosives license for the job on the spot and swore that Vella would be fined thousands by the city. “Not only that, you reckless wop, you’ll lose the bond you had posted in case of damage. Look what you did to the neighborhood! 125th Street is almost washed away and you flooded every cellar from here to 110th!”

Isaac Bell issued quick orders to Archie Abbott before he accompanied Giuseppe Vella downtown. When they got to 13th Street, he confirmed that Harry Warren’s detectives were keeping an eye on the man’s home. Then he went to his room at the Yale Club, where he changed into dry clothes and oiled his firearms. He was retrieving the soaked contents of his pockets and smoothing a damp two-dollar bill, which would dry no worse for wear, when it occurred to him what the high quality paper that the Black Hand letter had been written on reminded him of.

“Mr. Bell,” the hall porter called through his door. “Message from your office.”

Bell slit the envelope and read a one-word sentence written in the Boss’s hand.

“Report.”

Bell got there just as New York Police Department Captain Coligney was leaving Van Dorn’s office. They shook hands hello and Coligney said, “Take care in Washington, Joe. Good seeing you again.”

“Always a pleasure,” said Van Dorn. “I’ll walk you out.”

Back in sixty seconds, he said, “Good man, Coligney. The only captain Bingham didn’t transfer when he took over — presumably recalling that President Roosevelt boomed his career back when he was Police Commissioner.”

Van Dorn threw papers in a satchel and cast it over his shoulder. “A flood, Isaac. Set off by an overcharge explosion of dynamite on the premises of our client Mr. Vella, who hired the Van Dorn Detective Agency to protect him. By any chance could we call it a horribly timed coincidental accident?”

“Sabotage,” said Bell.

“Are you sure?”

“If a Water Department assistant engineer had not failed to show up for work at the main distribution gates, they could have stopped the water almost immediately. Archie Abbott found the poor devil in the hospital, beaten half dead. That makes two ‘horribly timed’ coincidences.”

“Then how do we convince clients that the Van Dorn Detective Agency can protect them from the Black Hand?”

“Same way you had Eddie Edwards drive gangs from the rail yards. Form a special squad and hit ’em hard.”

“We’ve already discussed your Black Hand Squad. I’m not about to commit the manpower, and, frankly, I don’t see the profit in it.”

“Very little profit,” Bell agreed freely. The fact was, ambition aside, Joseph Van Dorn cared far more about protecting the innocent than making a profit. All Bell had to do was remind him of it. “The Black Hand terrorize only their own countrymen. The poor folk can’t speak English, much less read it. Who can they turn to? The Irish cop who calls every man ‘Pasquale’?”

“Forgetting,” growled Van Dorn, “that it wasn’t that long ago Yankee cops called us Irish Paddy… But Mr. Vella and his fellow business men speak near-perfect English and read just fine.”

“Those are the Italians we have to persuade not to forever link the Van Dorn Detective Agency to the Great Harlem Flood of 1906.”

“I am not in a joking mood, Isaac.”

“Neither am I, sir. Giuseppe Vella’s a decent man. He deserves better. So do his countrymen.”

“We’ll talk next week.” Van Dorn started out the door. “Oh, one more thing. How would you feel about taking over the New York field office? Lampack’s getting old.”

“I would not like that one bit, sir.”

“Why not?”

“I’m a field detective, not a manager.”

“The heck you’re not. You’ve ramrodded plenty of squads.”

“Squads in the field. Frankly, sir, if you won’t give me a Black Hand Squad, I would rather you appoint me Chief Investigator.”

“I’m Chief Investigator,” said Van Dorn. “And I intend to remain Chief Investigator until I can appoint a valuable man who is sufficiently seasoned to take over… Have you made any headway with that paper?”

“I have an agent on Park Row, canvassing the printers, stationers, and ink shops.”

4

Before he opened the morning mail, David LaCava filled his show window with stacks of ten-dollar bills and heaps of gold coins. Banco LaCava was a neighborhood bank that offered many services. His depositors trusted him to telegraph money to relatives elsewhere in America and even cable it back to Sicily; they trusted him to keep their wills and passports in his safe; and when they bought insurance and steamship tickets from LaCava, they knew the insurance would be paid up and the tickets weren’t forged. As the old country saying went, LaCava was “as honest as the Lottery.” But the plain, simple immigrants who had landed on Elizabeth Street direct from the countryside, or fled city slums that made Elizabeth Street tenements palaces by comparison, looked for proof in his show window that when they needed to withdraw cash Banco LaCava could cover them.

He opened his mail with trembling fingers. As he feared, more demands from the Black Hand. Under their “letterhead,” if silhouettes of a black hand and a skull pierced by a dagger could be dignified as such, his tormentors had scrawled another threat in crude English:

A bitter smile twisted his face. “Patients” for “patience.” “Spur” for “spurn.” Illiterate brigands. Like his depositors, LaCava, too, had come from nowhere and nothing. The way to success was to embrace all things American — first and foremost, learning to speak, read, and write the English language.

At the bottom of the page they had added a cartoon drawing of a stick of dynamite with a burning fuse. Like in the funny papers.

LaCava opened a drawer in his desk, which faced the street door of his storefront bank, and laid his hand on the cool steel of a .38 revolver. A lot of good it would do against dynamite. He shoved the gun and the letter in his coat and walked uptown to 13th Street, where he found Giuseppe Vella sitting at his kitchen table in his shirtsleeves. The contractor looked miserable, stuck in the house when a man should be at his business. LaCava showed him the letter, and Vella exploded to life in a burst of indignation.

“I’ve been thinking,” Vella said, “how to deal with these scum.” He yanked on his coat, adjusted his necktie, and slicked back his hair. “Come on, we’ll go see Branco.”

“I thought of going to him,” said LaCava. “Branco happened to be making a deposit when I got the first letter. I almost asked his advice, but I hardly know him.”

“Let me do the talking. I know him well. I dug his cellars.”

Business was booming at Branco’s Wholesale Grocery. Endless lines of enameled wagons crowded the curb, loading, clattering off, returning empty to be filled again by an army of clerks dashing from the store with boxes of macaroni, cans of olive oil, salt, peas, beans, and anchovies, wine, fish stock, and soap. Like Vella, like LaCava and other prominente, Antonio Branco had made a success in America — a bigger success than any of them, having won the Bureau of Water Supply contracts to feed ten thousand Italians working on the Catskill Aqueduct.

“Hello, my friends,” Branco called from the doorway. Like Vella, Branco made the effort to stick to English, even among countrymen. Although Branco’s accent was still strong, far more noticeable than Vella’s, and his American phrases often tangled words in odd order.

“When you are free,” Vella said, “could you come across the street for a coffee?”

“You will drink coffee in my own back room,” said Branco. “I am free right now.” He beckoned a clerk. “Take over. The front wagon is for special customer. Only the best… Come.” He led Vella and LaCava through the store to his office, which smelled of coffee. A kettle simmered on a gas ring. The long table where his staff took their meals was covered with a red and white checked oilcloth. A map of America’s railroads hung on the wall.

“Sit while I make.”

Vella smiled in spite of his troubles. “I thought rich men’s servants make their coffee.”

Branco looked up from the grinder with a conspiratorial grin. “I make better coffee than my servants. Besides, I am not rich.”

LaCava’s eyebrows rose in disbelief, and Vella greeted such modesty with the knowing smile of a fellow business man. “It is said that you turn your hand to many things.”

“I don’t count in one basket.”

Vella watched him putter about the makeshift kitchen, warming cups with boiling water, grinding the beans fine as dust. Antonio Branco had been the biggest Italian grocery wholesaler in New York City even before he landed the aqueduct job. Now he had thousands of captive customers shopping in labor camp company stores. He was also a padrone who recruited the laborers and stone masons directly from Italy.

In theory, city law banned padrones from the job, as did the unions, which fought the padrone system tooth and nail. In practice, the contractors and subcontractors of the Contractors’ Protective Association needed sewer, subway, street paving, and tunnel laborers precisely where and when events demanded. Branco worked both sides, hiring surrogate padrones to supply newly arrived immigrants for some sections of the aqueduct, while he ingratiated himself with the Rockmen and Excavators’ Union by operating as a business agent to furnish union laborers for others.

“You could teach a wife to make coffee,” said Vella.

“I don’t have a wife.”

“I know that. However, my wife’s younger sister — ten years younger — is already a splendid cook… and very beautiful, wouldn’t you agree, David?”

“Very, very beautiful,” said LaCava. “A girl to take the breath away.”

“Convent-schooled in the old country.”

“She sounds like a man’s dream,” Branco replied respectfully. “But not yet for me. I have things to finish before I am ready for family life.”

He curled wisps of cream onto the steaming cups and handed them over. “O.K.! Enough pussyfoot. I hear you have troubles uptown.”

“They took my license. The city is suing me. But that’s not why I’ve come. The Black Hand is after LaCava now. Show him the letter, David.”

Branco read it. “Pigs!”

“This is the fourth letter. I fear—”

“I would,” Branco said gravely. “They could be dangerous.”

“What would you do?”

“If it were me?” He sipped his coffee while he considered. “I would pay.”

“You would?” asked LaCava.

Vella was astonished. He had assumed that Branco’s city contracts made him untouchable.

“What else could I do? A small grocery I supply suffered attack last year. Have you ever seen what a stick of dynamite does to a store?”

Vella said, “I hate the idea of knuckling under.”

“Who doesn’t?”

“Besides, what’s to guarantee they won’t come back for more?”

“What would you do instead?”

“I have an idea how to stop them,” said Vella.

Branco cast a dubious glance at LaCava. LaCava said, “Listen to him. He has a good idea.”

“I am listening. What will you do, Giuseppe Vella?”

“I will make a ‘White Hand’ to fight a ‘Black Hand.’”

Branco switched to Italian. “A game of words? I don’t understand.”

Vella stuck to English. “We’ll form a society. A protective society. Remember the old burial societies? We’ll band together. Like-minded business men who might well be threatened next.”

Branco stuck with Italian. “Give them knives and guns?”

“Of course not. We’re not soldiers. We’re not policemen. We will pool our money and hire protection.”

“And who will protect you from the protectors?” Branco asked softly. “Guards have a way of turning on their masters. Guards are first to see that might triumphs.”

“We will hire professionals. Private detectives. Men of integrity.”

Antonio Branco looked Vella in the face. “Is the story true that it was detectives who got your daughter back from kidnappers?”

“From the Van Dorn Agency.”

“But weren’t those same Van Dorns guarding your excavation in Harlem?”

“I waited too long to go to them. The Black Hand struck before the detectives were ready to fight. Would you join us, Antonio?”

Branco took another deliberate sip from his cup, stared into it, then looked up at Giuseppe Vella. “It will be less trouble to pay.”

“We are American,” Vella insisted. “We have a right to make business in peace.”

“No. I’m sorry.”

Vella stood up. “Then I thank you for your coffee, and I thank you for listening. If you change your mind, I will welcome you.” He looked at LaCava. The banker hesitated, then stood reluctantly.

They were just rounding the corner onto Elizabeth Street when Branco caught up and took their arms. “O.K. I help.” He pressed a wad of bills into Vella’s hand. “Here’s one thousand dollars for my dues. Get the others to pony up and your White Hand Society will be on its way.”

“Thank you, my friend. Thank you very much. What changed your mind?”

“If you’re right and I’m wrong — if your Mano Blanca defeats Mano Nera—I will benefit. But if I have not sided with you against our enemy, then I would benefit from your victory without helping. That would not be honorable.”

Giuseppe Vella grinned with relief. Even LaCava looked happy. They were on their way. With Branco on board with such a big contribution, the others would be quick to join. “I hope I’m right. But if I’m wrong and you’re right, at least we’ll both explode.”

“You make terrible joke,” said Branco. His expression turned so bleak that Vella wished he had not said it.

In a surprise, Branco smiled as if abandoning forever every thought of any unhappiness. “We’ll be blown to bits, everything except our honor.” He shrugged, and, still smiling, added, “We are invisible men in this country. We are poor. We have nothing but honor.”

“Italians won’t be poor forever,” said Giuseppe Vella. “Already I am not poor. David is not poor. You are not poor.”

“But at the Central Federated Union meeting last night, when they debated whether to support excavators striking the subway jobs, the Electrical Workers unionist shouted that Italian pick and shovel men were unskilled scum of the earth.”

“I was there, too,” said Vella. “A typesetter shouted back that his ancestors started here with a pick and shovel, and if the electrician was looking down on his ancestors, he better put up his fists.”

Branco smiled. “But we are still invisible… On the other hand”—an even bigger smile lit his mobile face—“invisible men aren’t noticed, until it’s too late.”

“Too late for what?”

“Too late to stop them.”

5

Van Dorn detective Harry Warren, dressed like the workmen drinking in the Kips Bay Saloon in shabby coats and flat caps, planted a worn boot on the brass rail, ordered a beer, and muttered to the tall guy next to him, “How’d you talk the Boss into a Black Hand Squad?”

“I didn’t,” said Isaac Bell without shifting his gaze from the mirror behind the bar, which reflected the view through the saloon’s window of the Banco LaCava storefront across the street. He had tricked out his workman’s costume with an electrician’s cylindrical leather tool case slung over his shoulder. In it were extra manacles for bomb planters who surrendered and a sawed-off shotgun for those who didn’t.

“A bunch of Italian business men did it for me. Marched in with a bag of money to hire the agency for protection, and Mr. Van Dorn decided it was about time.”

Warren asked, “Would they happen to call themselves the White Hand Society?”

No one knew the streets of New York better than Harry Warren. He had probably heard of the new outfit ten minutes after its founding. Which meant, Bell was painfully aware, so had the Black Hand.

“Giuseppe Vella launched it. He’s been getting Black Hand letters. David LaCava joined him. And some of their well-heeled friends. Banking, property, construction, a wine importer, and a wholesaler grocer.”

“Branco?”

“Antonio.”

“What did you think of him?”

“He wasn’t there. But Vella told me he put up the seed money that got the others into it. The Boss authorizes up to ten men — if you count apprentices.”

“How many speak Italian?”

“Just you, Harry.”

The Van Dorn New York City street gang expert had changed his name from Salvatore Guaragna, following the example of New York Italian gangsters like Five Points Gang chief “Paul Kelly,” who took Irish names. He said, “I got an apprentice candidate who’s Italian. Little Eddie Tobin’s father found him living on a hay barge. Orphan. The Tobins took him in. Richie Cirillo. Sharp kid.”

“Glad to have him,” said Bell.

“Who’s the rest of your lineup?”

“Weber and Fields are parked down the street on a coal wagon.” Middle-aged Wally Kisley and Mack Fulton were the agency comedians. Nicknamed after the vaudevillians Weber and Fields, Kisley was Van Dorn’s explosives expert, Fulton a walking encyclopedia of safecrackers and their modi operandi.

Harry Warren grinned. “Helluva disguise. I couldn’t figure out if they were guarding the bank or fixing to rob it. Who else?”

“I’ve got Eddie Edwards coming in from Kansas City.”

“Valuable man. Though I’m not sure what a rail yard specialist can do on Elizabeth Street.”

“Archie Abbott is selling used clothes from that pushcart next to the bank.”

“You’re kidding!” Archibald Angell Abbott IV was the only Van Dorn listed in the New York Social Register. Warren wandered casually toward the free lunch, shot a glance out the window at a different angle, and came back with a sausage wrapped in a slice of bread. “I didn’t make him.”

“He didn’t want you to.”

“I’ve also got Wish Clarke and—”

“Forget Wish,” Harry interrupted. “Mr. Van Dorn is one step from firing him.”

“I know. We’ll see how he’s doing.” Aloysius Clarke, the sharpest detective in the agency — and the partner from whom Isaac Bell had learned the most — was a drinking man, and it was beginning to get the better of him.

“Who else?”

“Your Eddie Tobin.”

Harry nodded gloomily. Another apprentice. The Boss wasn’t exactly going all out.

“And Helen Mills.”

“The college girl?” Mills was a Bryn Mawr coed whom Bell had offered a summer job with the prospect of becoming a full-fledged apprentice when she graduated.

“Helen’s plenty sharp.”

“Is it true what the boys say? She decked Archie last year down in Washington?”

“Archie started it.”

Harry Warren went back to the free lunch for another look at the street. Bell divided his attention between customers going into Banco LaCava and toughs in the saloon who might be preparing an attack. Harry came back with a hard-boiled egg. “Let me guess,” he joked. “She’s the fat lady selling artichokes?”

“I sent Helen down to Park Row to get a line on where the Black Hand buys their stationery… Harry, why did you ask what I think of Branco?”

“He’s a strange one. Wholesale grocers tend to extort the smaller shops, force them to buy only from them and charge top dollar for cheap goods.”

“How do they force them to buy?”

“Run the gamut from getting them deep in hock to bombing their store. But I’ve never heard a breath of any of that about Antonio Branco.”

“Honest as the Lottery?” Bell asked with a thin smile.

“I wouldn’t go that far,” said Harry, “about anybody making a business in New York. And he’s also a labor padrone. Stone masons and laborers for the Catskill Aqueduct.”

“There’s a business ripe for abuse.”

“They tend not to be choirboys,” Harry agreed. “On the other hand, he’s worked his way into the union’s good graces. Slick.”

“But not the first,” said Bell. “D’Allesandro, with the subway excavators, started out a padrone.”

“And now that Branco’s joined the White Hands, he’s a Van Dorn client.”

“Unless he steps out of line,” said Bell, eye still locked on Banco LaCava.

“They’re remarkable,” David LaCava told Antonio Branco over a glass of wine in Ghiottone’s Café, a saloon across Prince Street from Branco’s Grocery that served as one of Tammany Hall’s outposts in the Italian colony. Ghiottone—“Kid Kelly” Ghiottone, a popular bantamweight boxer in his youth — delivered voters, and Tammany paid off with city jobs in the Department of Street Cleaning and immunity from the police. Which allowed the saloon keeper to lord it over the neighborhood.

LaCava told Branco how Isaac Bell’s Black Hand Squad was guarding his bank with men in disguise. “You would not look twice at them.”

Branco said, “So our White Hand Society has chosen well.”

“I’m convinced we’ve hired the best.”

“But how long can they stand guard?”

LaCava looked around the café, leaned closer, and whispered, “Guarding is only the first stage. Meanwhile, they observe and collect information. When they attack, the Black Hand won’t know what hit them.” He lowered his voice further. “I was talking to a New York Police Department detective—”

“Petrosino?”

“How did you know?”

Branco shrugged. “Who else?”

“Of course,” said LaCava, chastened by the subtle reminder that he was not the only business operator cultivating men with pull. “Petrosino says this is how the Van Dorns dismantled railroad gangs.”

“What did Lieutenant Petrosino say about the White Hand hiring Van Dorns?”

LaCava hesitated. “He says he understands. He knows he’s got plenty on his plate already. To be honest, I think he would have preferred we go to the police. But since we hired private detectives, he respects that we chose the Van Dorns.”

“Valuable men,” said Branco. “We’re lucky to have them.”

The next morning, Isaac Bell stationed all but two of his Black Hand shadows on Elizabeth Street before David LaCava filled his display window and opened his door for business. The exceptions were Wish Clarke, who still hadn’t shown up from nearby Philadelphia, and Helen Mills, whom Bell had sent back downtown to the printing district.

She was a tall, slim brunette who looked older than her eighteen years, and despite their rigorous schedules and merciless deadlines, every printer, typesetter, and paper supplier she spoke to found time to inspect her samples and offer advice. Several, old enough to be her father, discovered they were free for lunch. She turned them down — inventing a Van Dorn Detective Agency rule that forbade it — and kept moving from shop to shop, pausing between each to write notes in the memo book Isaac had given her. The sooner she learned all there was to know about the paper, the sooner she could convince Isaac to let her join the rest of the squad undercover in the field.

Then, out of the blue all of a sudden, after an ink salesman left her alone with a pimply office boy to answer a telephone call, the boy said, “Money.”

“I beg your pardon?”

The boy was even younger than she and barely came to her shoulder.

“You could almost print two-dollar bills on that paper. If you had plates and ink.”

“Have you seen this paper before?”

“Not that same paper. But I’ve seen the type when they come for ink. The Boss sends them packing.”

“Who?”

“Fellows making green goods.”

“‘Green goods’? What are you talking about?”

“Passing the queer.”

“Queer what?” asked Helen.

The office boy stared at her like she was the biggest nincompoop in the city.

Richie Cirillo swore he was sixteen, but he looked twelve.

Isaac Bell tried to get a handle on how old the kid really was. “Why’d you leave school?”

“They stuck me in steamer class.”

“What is ‘steamer class’?”

“For the dummies.”

Harry Warren interpreted. “The teachers put Italian kids in the slow class. Their mothers work at home, finishing garments. The kids have to help. Sewing buttons and felling seams to midnight, then up at six for school — they’re not slow, they’re sleepy.”

“I was told you’re an orphan, Richie.”

“My mother got diphtheria. My father went back to Italy. But I really am sixteen, Mr. Bell.”

“What is this disguise you came up with?” In the business districts, a youthful Van Dorn apprentice would masquerade, typically, as a newsboy. But there were no boys hawking the Sun, the Times, the Herald, or the American on Elizabeth Street, where those who were literate only read Italian. Instead of newspapers, Richie Cirillo had a sack of cloth slung over his skinny shoulder.

“I’m a runner. Like I’m delivering dresses to be finished in the tenements and bringing them back to the factory when they’re done.”

“O.K. You’ll do.”

“Wow! Thank you, Mr. Bell.”

“Keep your eyes open. One eye on the bank, the other on one of us, so you know who to run to if you get in trouble.”

6

“Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned.”

Francesca Kennedy was a dark-haired, blue-eyed Irish-Italian beauty. Her pale white face shone like a splash of sunlight through the confessional lattice that hid the priest. She knelt in a good coat with a fur collar and a modest scarf to cover her head.

“How did you sin, my child?”

“I stabbed a man to death.”

“Did anyone see you?”

“No, Father.”

“Are you sure?”

“One hundred percent. It was just me and him in the bed.”

“Well done!”

A rolled-up silver certificate passed through the lattice. Francesca Kennedy unrolled it and examined it closely.

“It is not counterfeit,” the priest assured her.

“You want we should hit the Van Dorn captain?” whispered Charlie Salata.

Salata’s gang ran Black Hand letters, kidnapping, and protection, and he hadn’t gone to confession since he was a boy in Palermo, but kneeling in church still made him whisper. “Gold Head… Right? Show the Van Dorns who owns Elizabeth Street.”

Silence. He ventured a glance at the lattice. It was dark inside the priest’s booth. All he could see through the perforations in the crisscross wooden screen were Stiletto Man eyes, empty as night, clouds mobbing the stars. Still silent, but for a staccato click-click-click-click-click. Was he spooked or did he really hear the man behind the screen opening and shutting a knife again and again and again?

Salata tried again. “You prefer we hit the old dicks on the coal wagon? Spook their horse so he gallops into people and Van Dorns get blamed.” Again, Salata waited for a reaction. Precisely how his men should attack the Van Dorns guarding Banco LaCava would not ordinarily be worth troubling the Boss, but Salata recognized a delicate situation. The trick was to distract the Van Dorns so they could bomb Banco LaCava and get away with the money and at the same time scare the White Hand Society out of existence.

“Maybe we hit the red-haired one, show they can’t trick us.”

“Hit the kid.”

“The mick?”

“Not the mick. The Italian.”

“But he’s—”

“He’s what?”

“Nothing.” Salata backpedaled instantly. The stiletto was not a pistol. You didn’t wave it around, making threats. You only pulled it to kill. And to be sure to kill, you had to pull it without warning. The narrow blade could fit through the grid and right in his eye.

“Hit Richie Cirillo.”

That the Boss had discovered, somehow, the Van Dorn apprentice’s name was a stark reminder that Charlie Salata’s weren’t his only eyes and ears on the street. “The kid is Italian. He will be an example for the neighborhood. Teach them never go to police. Never go to Van Dorns.”

“How hard?”

“So hard, people don’t forget.”

Salata jumped from the kneeler and hurried out of the church.

Ten minutes later, right on schedule, his place was taken by Ernesto Leone, a counterfeiter.

“The plates are O.K.,” Leone reported. “The ink is better than before, but still so-so. The paper is the big problem. Like always.”

“Have you tried to pass any?”

“It’s not ready. Not good enough.”

“Tell Salata to send someone to Pennsylvania. Buy stuff in general stores.”

“I don’t think it will pass.”

“And Ferri. Tell Ferri send someone upstate.”

“It’s not good enough.”

“It is costing money and earning none.”

Leone said, “If there is trouble, Salata and Ferri will blame me.”

“My patience is not endless, Ernesto Leone.”

Leone scuttled from the church.

Roberto Ferri, a smuggler, confessed next. “My men caught wind of a heroin shipment. The Irish.”

“How big?”

“Very big, I am told. From Mexico.”

“Which Irish?”

“West Side Wallopers. Hunt and McBean.”

“Well done, Roberto!” Hunt and McBean were up and coming “graduates” of the Gopher Gang.

Ferri said, “I hear there is a market for cocaine on the aqueduct job. The Negroes use it. But no market for heroin… If you know anyone on the aqueduct, maybe we could trade heroin for cocaine.”

“You just get your hands on it. I’ll worry about the market.”

“You know someone to sell it to?”

“Good-bye, Ferri.”

Ferri lit his customary candle on his way out of the church.

Antonio Branco waited in the priest’s side of the confessional, his fingers busy as a clockwork as he practiced opening and closing his pocket knife. His knee had stiffened up, cramped in the booth. After Ferri left, he limped to the poor box and stuffed fifty dollars into it, “confessional rent” for the priests he had tamed. A flight of stone steps led down to the catacomb. Before he hit the bottom step, he had worked out the kink.

A low-ceilinged passage ran between the mortuary vaults under the church. He used a key to enter the crypt at the end. He locked the heavy door behind him, squeezed between stacks of caskets, unlocked a door hidden in the back, and stepped through a massive masonry foundation wall into a damp tunnel. The tunnel led under the church’s graveyard and through another door into the musty basement of a tenement. Repeatedly unlocking and relocking doors, he crossed under three similar buildings, cellar to cellar to cellar. The last door was concealed in the back of a walk-in safe, heaped with cash and weapons. Closing it behind him, he exited the safe into a clean, dry cellar, passed by a room with an empty iron cell that looked like a police lockup but for the soundproof walls and ceiling, unlocked a final oak door, and climbed the stairs into the kitchen in the back of his grocery.

“Where’s Gold Head?”

“I don’t see him.”

The detective’s spot at the Kips Bay bar was empty.

“Where’s the coal dicks?”

Their wagon was gone. So was Red-haired’s pushcart of old clothes.

“Who’s that?” A drunk was sprawled beside the Kips Bay stoop.

Charlie Salata crossed the street and kicked him in the ribs. The drunk groaned and threw up, just missing Salata’s shoes. Salata jumped back, and looked up and down the street for the twentieth time. Where in hell were the Van Dorns? Elizabeth between Houston and Prince was the most crowded block in the city. Five thousand people lived in the tenements and today it looked like most were on the sidewalk.

“No Van Dorns? Let’s do it.”

But still Salata hesitated. It felt like a setup.

“False money,” Helen Mills reported to Isaac Bell.

The tall detective was combing black shoe polish through his hair in the back of a horse-drawn silver-vault van parked at Washington Square nine blocks from Elizabeth Street. Helen had helped him and Archie on the Assassin case last year, and Bell regarded both her and her father as friends. Raised as an Army child, she had a refined sense of rank and protocol and had concluded she would address him as “Mr. Bell” on the job.

“Counterfeiters passing the queer?”

Her eyes were bright with excitement, which Bell did not want to damp down even as he explained why it was unlikely. “Good job, Helen. If the extortionists are also counterfeiters, we’ll have stumbled upon something rather unusual.”

“Unusual?”

“There are certain kinds of crimes that don’t usually mix. The criminal who would attempt to print money is not usually the sort who would threaten violence.”

“Never?”

“I’m not saying never, which is why I want you to follow up on this very interesting lead. The Secret Service investigates counterfeiting. It takes a lot of doing to get them to talk to private detectives, but they might make an exception for you. Go find Agent Lynch. Chris Lynch. He’s their man in New York. Show him the paper. Tell him what you learned on Printer’s Row.”

To Bell’s surprise, Helen bridled.

“What’s wrong?”

She sounded indignant. “Am I supposed to bat my eyes at Lynch?”

“Bat them if you want to. Feel out the situation and act accordingly.”

“Because I must tell you, Mr. Bell, the printers think being a detective makes me fast. Two asked me to lunch, and one old geezer tried to take me to Atlantic City for the weekend.”

“I’ve not run into that problem,” said Isaac Bell. “But here’s a suggestion. Instead of batting your eyes at Lynch, try dropping your father’s name. The Secret Service might be inclined to talk to the daughter of a brigadier general.”

“Isaa — Mr. Bell, I know I’m only an intern, but I was hoping you’d put me to work in the street on this Banco LaCava job.”

“If you make that stationery nail a Black Hand extortionist, I will personally promote you to full-fledged apprentice.”

“Even before I graduate?”

Bell hesitated, imagining grim-visaged Brigadier G. Tannenbaum Mills turning purple. “I suspect your father will express strong views on the subject of leaving college before you complete your degree.”

Charlie Salata made his boys prowl Elizabeth Street for an hour.

“They’re here,” he kept saying, anxiously scanning the street, sidewalks, wagons, pushcarts, windows, rooftops, and fire escapes. “I can’t see ’em, but I feel ’em. Like I can smell ’em — what’s that kid doing?”

“Pasting playbills.”

The gangsters watched the kid plaster posters to walls, the sides of wagons, and even shopwindows when the owners weren’t looking. They advertised a performance of Aida at the nearby Mincarelli Opera House, which catered to immigrants. The bill poster crossed Houston and plastered his way uptown and out of sight.

An unusually tall Hebrew caught Salata’s eye when he emerged from a tenement dressed head to toe in coat, trousers, shoes, and hat as black as his beard. Salata studied him suspiciously. The Hebrew dodged the organ grinder’s monkey plucking pennies from the pavement, and hurried inside the next tenement. Only one of the many Jewish needlework contractors who recruited Italian housewives to sew piecework in their kitchens.

“Why don’t we just bomb the bank?” an underling asked.

“Why don’t you shut your mouth?” It was obvious to anyone but a cafon two hours off the boat. Blowing the windows out of Banco LaCava was the easy part. Pawing through the wreckage to get the money out of the safe would take time. They’d have a few minutes before the cops and firemen arrived, but no time at all if Van Dorns were close enough to mob them. Plus — a big plus not to be ignored — the Boss had given orders to make an example of the Van Dorn apprentice.

“There! Richie Cirillo.”

The kid was trotting past Banco LaCava with a clothes sack almost bigger than he was. Salata grabbed the cafon. “Stick that skinny little rat.”

Richie Cirillo saw the killer coming after him, running in a low half crouch like a barrel-chested dog. Fiery eyes bored into his as the man shoved through the dense crowds.

The boy panicked. He dropped his clothing sack and ran across the street toward the Kips Bay Saloon, forgetting that Mr. Bell was no longer watching from the bar. His vision contracted. All he could see through a path of moving obstacles, rushing people, carts, and wagons was safety inside the saloon. All he had to do was reach the front stoop, leap over the drunk sprawled on it, and get inside.

People saw the fear on his face, and the path opened wide. They scrambled out of his way. He burst past them — they couldn’t help if they tried — skidded on the greasy cobblestones, and fell on his face. Before he was back on his feet, the killer had halved his lead. A stiletto gleamed in his fist.

Isaac Bell bolted from a tenement in black Hebrew garb and ran after the thug chasing the apprentice. The block was packed with innocents, too many people for gunplay. An empty delivery wagon blocked his path. As he vaulted over it, he saw Archie Abbott, his hair dyed dark like Bell’s, drop the reins of a horse cart heaped with rags and jump from the driver’s seat. Harry Warren leaped from a second-story fire escape, slid down a canvas shop awning, and hit the sidewalk running.

The killer caught up six feet from the front stoop of the Kips Bay Saloon.

Richie’s senses were heightened by fear. For a second, he could see and feel and hear everything at once — the drunk blinking awake at his feet, the shadow of the man behind him, the stiletto hissing as it parted the air. He twisted frantically from its path. Aimed at the back of his neck, the blade slipped past and tore through his ear. The pain stopped him cold, and, in that instant, the killer thrust again.

Richie heard a startled grunt.

The stiletto fell on the sidewalk, ringing like a chime. The killer doubled over, clutching his groin. A fist rose from the sidewalk like a pile driver in reverse and smashed the killer’s face. Richie heard bones snap. Blood spattered the drunk, who sagged back down on the stoop and closed his eyes.

The man who had tried to stab him reached to pick up his knife. Bell stepped on his hand, and Abbott clamped manacles on his wrists.

Isaac Bell seized Richie’s shoulder and clapped a handkerchief over his ear. “O.K., boy?”

“I think so. Thanks to this guy.”

Bell knelt beside the drunk. “Wish, where did you come from?”

“Philadelphia,” said Aloysius Clarke. “Sorry I fell asleep.”

“Heck of a disguise.”

“I’ve been practicing my whole life.”

A loud explosion showered them with glass.

7

“Mano Nera! Mano Nera!”

Gold coins, ten-dollar bills, and broken glass flew from Banco LaCava’s show window and cascaded into Elizabeth Street. Dust and smoke gushed from the shattered bank and the front of the tenement in which it was housed.

“Mano Nera! Mano Nera!”

Within moments, hundreds of people crowded onto fire escapes, screaming, “Mano Nera! Mano Nera!” and thousands surged from their tenements. As the mad rush filled the sidewalks and spilled into the street, David LaCava stormed out with a pistol and a wastebasket and began picking up the money. His cheek was cut, and blood reddened his shirtfront.

“You two help him,” Bell ordered Wally Kisley and Mack Fulton, and led Archie and Harry Warren into the building. They searched for trapped and injured. Inside the front hall, broken plaster and splintered lath littered the floor. Through swirling dust, Bell saw that the bomb had blown a hole in a wall between the building and the bank and LaCava’s apartment behind it. Two men hauling sacks of money from LaCava’s safe jumped through the hole.

Isaac Bell and Archie Abbott knocked both to the floor in a flurry of fists and blackjacks. A third thug leaped through the hole, waving a gun. Harry Warren fired his pistol first and dragged the money back through the hole, while Bell and Archie Abbott carried Mrs. LaCava and her two children out of their wrecked parlor.

Cops and plainclothes detectives arrived on the run from their Mulberry Street Station House. White horses galloped through the crowds, dragging fire engines.

“What are you doing here?” asked a detective, taking charge of the prisoner Harry Warren handed over. The others had escaped.

“Guarding the bank.”

“Made a hash of it.”

“No kidding.”

Wally Kisley hurried up to Bell with a rag collector’s sack over his shoulder. Bell asked, “Where’s Richie?”

“Doctor’s sewing his ear. Don’t look now, but the Boss is here.”

“He’s in Washington.”

“Was,” said Harry. “He looks mad enough to bite the heads off nails. Or detectives.”

“I’m afraid I know which one,” said Bell.

Sure enough, Joseph Van Dorn was shouldering a beeline for the Kips Bay Saloon. Bell caught up with him as he knelt beside Wish Clarke, who had fallen back to sleep. Van Dorn seized his shoulder in his massive hand and shook him hard.

“Wake up, Aloysius!”

Wish Clarke opened his eyes, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and smiled. “Hello, Boss.”

“You’re fired.”

Isaac Bell said, “He saved Richie Cirillo’s life.”

“I heard all about it. He’s drunk. Dumb luck he woke up in time and dumb luck he didn’t get the rest of you killed. Aloysius, you’re the best detective I know. I’ll welcome you back when you’re stone-cold sober and dry for the rest of your life. Until then, I don’t want to see your face.”

He stood up, turned, and hurried away. Then he turned back, knelt again, and awkwardly patted Wish’s shoulder. “Bejesus, man, I’ve known you almost as long as I’ve known Mack and Wally. I hope you can come back.”

“Thanks, Joe.”

Van Dorn stalked off.

Isaac Bell helped his old friend to his feet.

Wish said, “Sorry I let you down, Isaac.”

“You didn’t let me down. I’d have lost an apprentice without you. I’m only sorry the Boss doesn’t see it that way.”

Wish looked immensely sad and fumbled for his hip flask. “Don’t get on the wrong side of this, old son. The Boss is right.”

“What were you doing in the bank?” a police detective roared at the gangster the Van Dorns had turned over to him.

“Buy steamship ticket.”

“Where to?”

“Italia.”

“You’re lying, Pasquale. Your type don’t go back to Italy, they’d throw you in the hoosegow. What were you doing in the bank?”

“Big-a boom. Head hurts.”

“What is your business?”

“None.”

“Who do you run with? Salata?”

“Salata? Never heard of him.”

“Where do you live?”

“I’ve forgotten.”

The cop shouted, “You think I’m the soft mark, wiseacre? I’ll give you to Detective Petrosino. His boys’ll strip you down to your socks.”

“Won’t do no good,” Harry Warren muttered to Isaac Bell. “Sicilians don’t crack.”

Across the street, the killer whose nose Wish Clarke had broken insisted to the cops that he had been running into the Kips Bay for a beer when a drunk attacked him.

“Was that before or after you dropped your stiletto?”

“Not mine.”

“Pasquale, I got witnesses saw you stabbed a kid with it.”

“Nobody remember in trial.”

The cop winked at Harry Warren. “If they was Italians who saw you stick the kid, you’d probably be right, Pasquale. You’ve got the poor devils too scared to remember their own mothers. But my witnesses are Van Dorns. They got a saying. They never forget. Never… So let’s start over. What’s your name?”

“Pasquale.”

“What’s your name?”

“Pasquale.”

“He’s Vito Rizzo,” Harry Warren interrupted. “One of Salata’s boys, aren’t you, Vito?”

“Gimme lawyer.”

Warren said to Bell, “He’ll jump bail tomorrow.”

“We’ll press charges.”

“He’ll still be out on bail. They got pull at Tammany Hall.”

The cops and firemen restored order, and the neighborhood started to settle down. But even as they cleared the street of people gawking, a long line of depositors, clutching bankbooks, formed at the shattered front door of Banco LaCava.

Bell gave the cops on guard a look at his Van Dorn badge, and Harry Warren slipped each two dollars. They found LaCava stuffing his safe with the money he had scooped from the street and Bell’s squad had rescued.

“My business is ruined. People are running to my bank to take their money.”

“Why? You got your money back.”

“They can’t trust their money will be safe with me. They know the Black Hand will come again. I should have paid like my friend Branco told me.”

When Bell and Harry Warren were alone, the gang detective said, “His ‘friend’ Branco could be the guy who sent the extortion letter. First they send it. Then they just happen to show up like a friend or fellow business man, advising you to pay.”

Isaac Bell studied Antonio Branco from the café across Prince Street from Branco’s Grocery. Leaning, half seated, half standing, against a tall stool, he cut a well-to-do figure, in a tailored blue suit of broadcloth fit more for the board of director’s dining room than a bustling grocery. Ditto his custom-made shoes, polished to a mirror shine.

He was significantly taller than the clerks and drivers he was overseeing loading his wagons, an animated presence with flashing eyes, a trim mustache, and thick, curly hair black as anthracite. His face was constantly changing: a robust smile for a quick-moving employee, a harsh scowl for a laggard, a satisfied nod for a full wagon. An orange fell from a broken crate, he snapped it out of the air with a lightning grasp.

Bell crossed the street. Branco tracked him with alert eyes and a curious gaze as if instinctively aware that the tall detective weaving smoothly through the traffic had business with him. He stood up and crossed the sidewalk to intercept him, and Bell saw that he walked with a slight limp, with one foot kicking slightly to the side. It did nothing to diminish the impression of a coiled spring forged of the strongest alloy.

Bell extended his hand. “Isaac Bell, Mr. Branco. Van Dorn Detective Agency. I understand you told David LaCava to pay the Black Hand.”

Branco looked away with a sad smile. “I told David LaCava and Giuseppe Vella. Apparently, they should have listened to me.”

“But if you felt that way, why did you join their White Hand Society?”

“I was skeptical. But it was the right thing to help. Even if not wise.”

“Skeptical? Or afraid?”

When an expression of contempt hardened Branco’s face and steel glittered in his eyes, Bell was struck by an odd feeling that they had met earlier. Before he could pin the memory, Branco smiled, and the steely glitter softened to a good-humored sparkle. “There are forces it sometimes behooves us to accommodate.”

“Were you born in America, Mr. Branco?”

“No. Why do you ask?”

“You have a native’s command of the language.”

Branco beamed. “Would that were so. My accent ever marks me a newcomer.”

“It is barely noticeable,” said Bell, “while you turn a fine phrase. When did you arrive?”

“I first came as a harp slave when I was eight years old and I have lived here on and off ever since… You look puzzled. A ‘harp slave’ is a boy made to play music in the streets and bring his padrone the coins that kind people toss to him.”

“A slave implies a cruel master.”

Branco shrugged. “I learned my English, I learned to read.”

“All at eight? You’re practically a native.”

“I returned to Italy when my padrone died. In those days, a steerage ticket back was seven dollars. Even a boy could go home.”

“I’ve heard that now you are a padrone.”

“Not for children,” Branco said sharply. “I help padrones find work for grown men.”

“On the aqueduct?”

“I am privileged to help the Excavators’ Union build this important feat. Now, since you’ve come on detective business, do you have any more questions before I continue conducting my business?”

“One more. Will your White Hand Society disband?”

“You mean will the society continue to pay Van Dorn?”

Now Bell’s eyes flashed annoyance. “The Van Dorn Agency will work to put the gang that attacked Banco LaCava behind bars, gratis. I meant precisely what I asked you — will your protective society disband?”

“If you are not worried about being paid, why do you care?”

“Your society will be a source of information. And give strength to the weak.”

“I hope it does not disband,” said Branco. “Good men should stand together. If we did disband, why would you still hunt the Black Hand? To avenge your boy they stabbed? Or because they made you look bad?”

Isaac Bell’s vow to avenge the attack on his apprentice and restore faith in the agency by catching the dynamiters was none of Branco’s business and he answered only the higher truth. “Because they are criminals who prey on the innocent.”

“It is not my experience that Americans care about innocent Italians.”

“It is my experience that the sooner we care about them, the sooner they’ll turn into Americans.”

“How long do you intend to pursue the bombers?”

“Until we catch them. Good day, Mr. Branco. Thank you for your time.”

Branco said, “I, too, have one more question — is Van Dorn a national enterprise?”

“We have field offices across the continent.”

“Do you combat ‘national’ criminals?”

“We pursue criminals across state lines, if that’s what you mean.”

“No, I mean are there criminal organizations that span the country?”

“They would have to master modern systems of national organization.”

“Like railroads?” asked Branco.

“Or the telegraph. Or Standard Oil and U.S. Steel. But since most criminals have trouble organizing a clean shirt in the morning,” Isaac Bell added with a smile, “it would require powerful adjustments of attitude.”

Bell walked away.

Antonio Branco enjoyed a private moment of satisfaction. Despite the detective’s flattering compliments about his English, to lull him into letting down his guard, he still formed thoughts in Italian. When, and if, you do catch them, Mr. Bell, who will you have caught? Peasants. Contadini. Of which Italy has an endless supply.

Most criminals have trouble organizing a clean shirt?

Mr. Bell, you and your Van Dorn Detective Agency will be amazed when a criminal organization spans your nation.

Suddenly, Bell was back, striding at Branco like a panther, his eyes aglow.

“Mr. Branco.”

“Did you forget something, Mr. Bell?”

“Do you recall when we met before?”

“I doubt we’ve run in the same circles.”

“Eleven years ago. I was a student.”

“Eleven years ago, I was a laborer.”

“In New Haven, Connecticut.”

“Wherever there was work.”

“I was at college in New Haven.”

“As I said, we did not run in the same circles.”

“We were running, all right. Both of us. Running from New Haven Railroad cinder dicks.”

Branco smiled. He looked intrigued. “Not in New Haven. I ran from no railroad police in New Haven.”

“North of New Haven. In the Farmington yard.”

Antonio Branco stared at Isaac Bell. He moved near and inspected him very closely. Then he stepped back and looked him up and down, hat to boots. “Incredibile!” he breathed at last. “Incredibile!”

“You remember?”

“It is incredible. Yes, I do remember. I did not get much of a look at you in the dark, but your stance is the same.”

“So is yours,” said Bell. “And your limp. Do you still carry your knife?”

“What knife?”

“The one you pulled on me.”

Branco smiled. “I recall no need to pull a knife on a college boy.”

“You did,” said Bell. “And you also pulled one on a rail cop in New Haven earlier that night.”

“No.”

“Right before you rode my train to Farmington.”

“No, Mr. Bell. I did not pull a knife on a rail cop. I did steal a ride on your train… I didn’t realize it was your train. I thought it belonged to the railroad.”

Bell could not help but smile back. “I borrowed it. College high jinks.”

“I guessed as much,” said Branco.

“The rail cop was attacked that same night. Did you happen to witness it?”

Branco hesitated. Then he shrugged. “It was long ago.”

“So you did see it.”

“A tramp cut the rail cop and ran away. It did allow me to escape, but I am not the man who cut him. Was the cop badly injured?”

“He survived,” said Bell.

“Then all is well that ends well.”

“He was horribly scarred.”

“Good. I am glad to hear that.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“He ‘scarred’ me, too. Nearly broke my leg. You yourself see, I limp to this day. It aches when storms are coming. Which is not supposed to happen to young men like me and you.”

“Who was the man with the knife?”

“The tramp? I never saw him before.”

“The cop said he was Italian.”

“Many hobos were Italian in those days. Still are. I didn’t know him. But I owe him. Thanks to him, I escaped the railroad cop. You owe him, too.”

“How do you reckon that?”

“Thanks to him, you weren’t caught when you ‘borrowed’ your train, which you would have been if he hadn’t slashed the cop. So we have that tramp in common. He saved us both for better things.”

“What better things?”

“The laborer became a business man. The train thief became a detective.”

Isaac Bell laughed. “Only in America.”

The tall detective and the wealthy grocer exchanged a powerful handshake.

Branco returned to his business, and Bell caught the train uptown.

Harry Warren was waiting in the detective bull pen. “Black Hand?”

“I can’t read him yet. But whatever Antonio Branco wants, he’s capable of getting. A formidable man. Angry man, too, though he covers it. Mostly”—Bell considered Branco’s tale of the tramp and the railroad cop and added—“he’s also a first class liar.”

Wally Kisley came in the back entrance, still in the costume of a rag collector with dirty hands and face. “I got something for you.”

From his rag sack he pulled a red tube that looked like a dynamite stick. Detectives nearby edged away. Kisley tossed it to them and they dove for cover. It bounced on the floor with a hollow thunk.

Kisley grinned. “I emptied the nitro.”

Bell asked, “Where’d you find it?”

“Under LaCava’s safe.”

“Why blow the safe? It was open during the day.”

“I think it was part of the bundle that blew the wall. But it misfired. Got blown through the wall and bounced under the safe.”

“What does it do for us?”

“Read the name.”

“Stevens.”

“You can’t buy the Stevens brand in New York City. It’s made in New Jersey by a subsidiary of Dupont’s Eastern Dynamite Company and distributed to small-town hardware stores. It’s a short stick, shorter than what you’d find in mining or big excavation jobs. For farmers blowing stumps.”

“Where’d the Black Hand get ahold of it?”

“Some hardware or feedstore in New Jersey or Pennsylvania, I’d guess. Point is, they didn’t buy or steal it in New York City.”

Bell remembered that Giuseppe Vella claimed that his foreman, Russo, had discovered the overcharge too late to stop the water main explosion. It was a long shot, but he wondered whether Russo had noticed in the confusion the type of dynamite in the overcharge?

Vella had no telephone since the Combustibles Department put him out of business. Bell hurried downtown and found him at his house on 13th Street. Vella greeted him warily, and Bell guessed that he had paid the ransom the Black Hand had demanded for the rescued Maria. He showed Vella the empty Stevens dynamite tube.

“Have you ever seen this brand?”

“In the countryside.”

“Not in New York?”

“Not on my jobs.”

“Did your foreman Russo happen to say anything about the dynamite in the overcharge?”

“He was excited, yelling, ‘Big-a bang! Big-a bang!’”

“But when he disconnected the detonating wires, would he have noticed what brand it was?”

Vella shrugged. “Who knows?”

Only Russo, thought Bell. “Is it possible, Mr. Vella, that Russo himself laid the overcharge for the Black Hand?”

Vella shrugged. “Who knows? Anything is possible.”

“How likely?”

“Not likely. Sante Russo is a good man.”

“Do you know where he is?”

Vella hesitated.

Bell said, “I am hunting the criminals who ruined your job. The criminals who kidnapped your daughter. Russo can help me find them.”

“How?”

“It is important that I learn if this is the same dynamite that ruined your job.”

Vella nodded. “O.K. I understand… Russo sent a telegram asking would I wire him the money he was owed for his last week of work. His salary.”

“Where did you send the money?”

“What makes you think I paid him?”

“You’re an honest man, Giuseppe Vella. It would never occur to you not to pay a man who worked for you. Even if he’s on the run and can’t collect it. Did he come for the money or did you send it?”

“He asked that I wire it to St. Louis.”

Isaac Bell set his squad on a search for foreman Russo.

8

Brewster Claypool was a slim-as-a-wisp, graceful Southerner who reminded people of the witty and stylish Oscar Wilde. Slouching languidly from the Metropolitan Opera House in white tie and tails, drifting down Broadway like an elegant parenthesis, he peered into the darker cross streets with a connoisseur’s appreciation of New York’s Tenderloin. Brightly lighted Broadway was lined with fine hotels and restaurants, but the rest of the district was devoted to sin. If a vice could be imagined, the Tenderloin offered it in gambling dens, dance halls, saloons, and bordellos priced for every purse. The Progressives called it Satan’s Circus. Brewster Claypool called it Heaven.

He mounted the steps to the Cherry Grove bordello, a lavishly furnished elite house known as the Ritz of the Tenderloin, and rang an electric bell. A three-hundred-pound door guard ushered him into the sturdy brick mansion with great respect. A dazzling young woman in a red evening gown greeted him warmly. “Upstairs, Mr. Claypool?”

“I think I’ll pop into the club first.”

A group of top Wall Street men had formed a private club inside the whorehouse. The Cherry Grove Gentlemen’s Society membership requirements were: extreme wealth and no blue noses. The house rules: No conversation or event left the room. No women were allowed in wearing more than two garments — neither garment could exceed the surface area of a dinner plate; a measuring stick was kept handy to settle disputes.

Claypool found his brother members lounging in vast leather armchairs, drinking champagne and whiskey cocktails. John Butler Culp, a vigorous big-game hunter and yacht racer who maintained the physique of a college pugilist and football hero, was cursing President Roosevelt.

“This wild, arrogant man, who only became president when the radicals assassinated President McKinley, will inflict fatal injury on our nation.”

Culp was a Wall Street titan — sometimes partner, often as not rival, of J. P. Morgan, Judge Congdon, Frick, Schwab, and J. D. Rockefeller. He combined cunning financial strategies with strict management to spawn railroads, mines, and mills, to consolidate wealth into great wealth, and to sharpen great wealth into power. He had the ear of Supreme Court justices, United States senators in his pay, and the confidence of presidents, but not this one. Late at night, alone with fellow “Cherry Grovers,” he allowed his animosity free rein in a cold voice brimming with righteous fury.

“President McKinley defended property rights. This Roosevelt is a socialist rabble-rouser snatching our property.”

“Teddy claims he won’t run again,” a banker interrupted.

“He lies! America is doomed if this darling of the Progressives serves this full term. Men of means will have no place in this country if he hangs on long enough to get reelected in ’08.”

Culp delivered this last with a glance at Brewster Claypool, a flash of dark eyes under heavy brows, so swift that none of the others noticed.

Claypool waved languidly to a raven-haired beauty in no danger of violating the dress code. She hurried to him with a crystal Old Fashioned glass and a bottle of Bushmills. “Just a splash, my dear. I must be on my way.”

“Aren’t you coming upstairs?”

“Not tonight, I’m afraid. I would be too distracted to be amusing.”

He took his drink into the small library off the main room, settled into an armchair, and prayed that Culp would join him.

Claypool was “Culp’s man,” and he had heard enough to know that he had just received his marching orders. Truth be told, he had seen this coming since Roosevelt was elected in ’04. Culp was afraid. In fact, he was terrified, which made him very dangerous.

President Roosevelt was breathing down his neck. It wasn’t only that TR was leading the Progressive reform attack against monopolies, oil and railroad trusts, and stock manipulation — all sources of Culp’s booming fortune — but down in the Isthmus of Panama, Teddy was “making the dirt fly,” digging the ship canal to connect the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. And he had vowed, as only Teddy could — loudly and publicly — to prosecute business men who profited illegally from his canal.

Which, of course, Culp had — having financed a revolution to secure the route from friendly natives, rigged the Panama Canal Treaty to keep the canal out of the hands of those same natives, stolen millions from investors, and maneuvered Congress into paying millions more for canal rights that lined the pockets of Culp and his friends.

Claypool’s lawyers and lobbyists were working round the clock to disarm the canal time bomb. But if the President ever discovered that J. B. Culp had also masterminded the notorious Ramapo Grab — a private water company swindle that had almost won out over then-Governor Roosevelt’s Catskill Aqueduct project — Teddy would not rest until Culp was in prison.

So Claypool was not surprised that J. B. Culp wanted the President of the United States removed from office. Culp needed the President removed from office. Unfortunately, impeachment was not possible. TR might exasperate and TR might unsettle, but even voters who didn’t love him were at least fascinated, and two-thirds of the Senate was not was about to rile them by kicking out the President they had elected fair and square.

All of which meant that J. B. Culp wanted the President dead. As Culp’s behind-the-scenes fixer, it was Brewster Claypool’s job to find someone to kill him, while separating them from the crime by layer upon layer of isolation.

Unless he could talk Culp out of it.

Claypool nursed the whiskey until the glass was bone-dry, and he had almost given up hope when, at last, Culp lumbered in and loomed over his chair. He was a big man who used his bulk to intimidate.

“What are you waiting for?”

“An opportunity to talk sense. Would you please sit down?”

“My mind is made up. The man must go.”

Claypool rose to his feet. “May I point out that he’s not just a man. He is the President of the United States.”

“I don’t care if he’s the King of England. Or the bloody Pope. Or the Almighty Himself. He will destroy us if we don’t get rid of him.”

“Is there no other way?”

Culp repeated, “Theodore Roosevelt will destroy us if we don’t get rid of him.”

9

“Look out, Mr. Bell!” the Van Dorn front desk man telephoned Isaac Bell in the detective bull pen. “Opera singer coming at you! I had to release the electric lock before she broke down the door.”

Coloratura soprano Luisa Tetrazzini, the “Florentine Nightingale,” burst into the bull pen and embraced Bell. Despite the Knickerbocker’s steam heat, she was bundled in a coat, and her throat was swathed in an immensely long red scarf that trailed behind her. Her eyes were wild.

“Isaac!” she cried in a voice trained to carry to the back of a five-hundred-seat house. “Where is Joseph?” Knickerbocker permanent residents like her and Caruso, several theater impresarios, and the Van Dorns, shared a sort of small-town neighborliness. People dropped in to visit, lingered in hallways, and addressed each other by first name.

She was thirty-five years old, a shapely, Rubenesque dark-haired beauty with an expressive face, a love of drama, and a will of iron. She had made her American debut last year in San Francisco, before the earthquake. Caruso himself praised her voice and her acting. “Not yet a star,” he had told Bell when Bell described hearing her sing in San Francisco. “But soon! Mark my words. The world will kiss her feet.”

“Joseph,” Bell answered, “is in Washington.”

“But I am desperate. Look what they do.” She thrust a letter at him. “Open!”

Bell recognized the paper. He unfolded it and saw what he expected, the now-familiar skull and dagger and the black hand. Mano Nera was stepping up in the world, first the helpless, then the well-off, now the famous.

“Don’t be afraid,” said Bell, “we’ll—”

“I’m not afraid! I’m angry.”

“When did you get this?”

“Twenty minutes ago. In the afternoon mail.”

“Is this the first you’ve received?”

“Two last week. I thought it make joke.”

“Do you have them?”

“I burned them in the fire. Isaac, I need guard. I’m going to sing in San Francisco again. For the earthquake victims.”

“When do you leave?”

“Tomorrow. I think maybe I should not be alone with only my maid. I need Van Dorn guard.”

Bell thought fast. His Black Hand Squad was up and running, though with no clients, the White Hand Society having terminated their contract. The hunt for Russo, the blaster, had shifted west from St. Louis. The Van Dorn Denver field office was looking for him in the mining camps. Russo could well be heading for San Francisco, which had a large Italian colony.

He fingered the letter. Definitely the same paper.

“Helen?” he called out. “Where’s Helen Mills? There you are. This is for the Secret Service. Take it to Agent Lynch. Wait a minute. Helen?… Excuse me, Luisa, I will be right back.” He led his intern away from the desk, out of earshot. “What’s that bulge?”

“What bulge?”

Bell pointed. “That.”

In her family’s Dupont Circle mansion, Bell had seen Helen wear the latest styles of one-color, single-piece shirtwaist suits. Here, she wore the traditional young office girl’s separate shirtwaist tucked into a trumpet skirt.

“That bulge is me.”

“Not that. That pocket pistol under the pleats. Hand it over.” He opened a big hand and waited for her to put the gun in it. “You know that Van Dorn apprentices are not allowed to carry guns.”

“It’s my father’s.”

“I’ll return it to him next time I’m in Washington.”

She checked the hammer was on an empty chamber and handed Bell the pocket pistol, butt first.

“Just for the record,” said Bell, “interns are not even permitted a nail file.”

“What if I break a fingernail?”

“Rub it on a brick wall.”

“Mr. Bell?”

“What?”

“Are you going to tell me that you never hid a gun when you were an apprentice?”

“I didn’t get caught. Go! Show Lynch… And Helen?”

“What is it?”

“See if you can find out something that Lynch really wants.”

“He wants to take me to Coney Island.”

Bell grinned. “Something he wants from us. Some business Van Dorns can do for him. I have a funny feeling about this counterfeiting.”

He returned to Tetrazzini.

“I will escort you personally to San Francisco on the train. When we get to San Francisco, our field office will take good care of you. Mr. Bronson, the detective in charge, is a top-notch man and happens to be a great fan of the opera. I’m told he took to his bed when you left San Francisco.”

“Mille o tante grazie, Isaac. I’m not afraid, but who can say… Isaac? Don’t you have a fiancée in San Francisco?”

“As a matter of fact, I do.”

As soon as she left, Bell telephoned Enrico Caruso. “Would it be convenient for me to come up and see you?”

Ten minutes later, Caruso welcomed him into his suite. They had met recently in the hotel’s lower lobby bar, where residents knew to find a quiet drink in the afternoon. The tenor was only a few years older than the detective, and they had hit it off when they discovered they both had survived the earthquake uninjured.

Caruso was wearing a woolen dressing gown and had his throat wrapped in three scarves to Tetrazzini’s one. His drawing room housed an eight-foot Mason & Hamlin grand piano and a wheezing machine of tanks and nozzles that emitted clouds of steam to moisten the air. “La Voce!” he said, stroking his throat. “Do feel free to remove your coat.”

Bell did so, gratefully. Panama jungles were cooler and drier than Caruso’s suite.

The singer stubbed out his cigarette and lit a fresh one. “I missed you at my Pagliacci!”

“I was busy getting dynamited.”

“All work and no play…”

“Tetrazzini got a Black Hand letter.”

“I know. I told her to go to you.”

“How about you? Did you get a letter?”

“No,” the singer said. “Why do you ask?”

“If they are the same gang that kidnapped Maria Vella and are dynamiting businesses, they might be stepping up, trying to see how high they can make threats pay. Luisa is not as famous as you by a long shot. What if they’re experimenting with her to see how it works? Before they go after a really big fish.”

Caruso beamed. He had a big cheerful face with a high brow and it lit up bright as an electric headlight. “So suddenly I am a fish.”

“A big fish.”

“But of course.”

“A big fish makes a big meal,” said Bell. “They demanded four thousand from Luisa. What would they ask from you. Forty?”

“At least.”

“I will keep you posted. Archie will be standing by if you need help while I’m in San Francisco.”

“San Francisco?” Caruso smiled. “Isn’t your fiancée in San Francisco?”

“As a matter of fact, she is,” said Bell, and Caruso broke into a new song not likely to be heard at the opera:

“’Round your heart a feeling stealing

Comes to drive away regret,

When you know you’re not forgotten

By the girl you can’t forget.

“How will the beauteous Marion feel about you sharing a transcontinental railroad train with a fiery soprano?”

Bell joked back that Luisa’s maid, the formidable Rosa Ferrara, took firm charge of the coloratura’s virtue. But he was thinking that if the threat against Luisa Tetrazzini was a test of the Black Hand’s power, then when she refused to pay, they would go all out to make an example of her. And, he realized with sudden icy clarity, that the timing of the Black Hand letter was no coincidence. They knew she was traveling to San Francisco.

The farther from New York they attacked, the more threatening they would appear to future victims.

Shepherding Tetrazzini and her maid Rosa aboard the 20th Century Limited for the first leg across the continent, Isaac Bell kept a sharp eye on the gangs of immigrant laborers. Grand Central was in tumult — tracks and platforms shifted, steam shovels shaking the ground — as the demolition of the old station proceeded simultaneously with construction of the new terminal. Wally Kisley stood watch at the 20th’s gate, dressed like a drummer in a loud checkerboard suit and pretending to read a newspaper. Mack Fulton was wheeling a handcart of luggage about the platform. Archie Abbott glowered officiously in the blue and gray uniform of a New York Central conductor.

At Chicago’s LaSalle Station, where they arrived on time twenty hours later, Van Dorn operatives from the head office guarded their change of trains. They made it to Union Station and boarded the Overland Limited without threat or incident, though Bell was not happy to see newspaper headlines ballyhooing the singer’s journey across the continent. Dinner that evening was the Overland chef’s version of her famous dish, Turkey Tetrazzini, and, at Omaha, opera fans mobbed the platform and forced their way onto the train, shouting, “Brava, Diva! Brava, Diva!”

Tetrazzini held court in the club car, swathed in scarves and uncharacteristically silent. Rosa Ferrara pantomimed the explanation, patting her own throat and whispering, “La Voce! Signora is resting her voice.”

Isaac Bell kept a hand inside his coat, gripping his Colt, and watched the fans’ faces. How easy it would be for a man or even a woman to thrust a stiletto from the crowd. He paid attention to their eyes, looking out for a telltale flash of ice, or fire, until the conductors had shooed the last of them off the train.

Peace prevailed at Ogden, two days later, where a wire from the Denver office was waiting for Bell. The Denver Van Dorns had missed Russo by hours. They speculated that he was headed to San Francisco, but an Italian who fit his description might have bought a ticket in the opposite direction, east to Kansas City.

In other words, thought Bell, Russo could be anywhere — including right here in Ogden. Nine railroad lines converged in the junction city, which would appeal to a man on the run. The lone Van Dorn Ogden operative, an aging, retired sheriff, met the train. Bell authorized him to dispense cash to rail dicks to keep an eye out for Russo.

The Overland continued steaming west, over Great Salt Lake on the Lucin Cutoff Trestle, and across Nevada. At Reno, powerful pusher engines joined on, and the train commenced the steep climb into the Sierra Nevada. Ascending for forty miles, the tracks crested at the seven-thousand-foot elevation. The train entered the long, dark Summit Tunnel and suddenly stopped.

Moments before the clash of brakes, and startled cries of passengers thrown from their seats, Isaac Bell and Luisa Tetrazzini and Rosa Ferraro had been exclaiming at the spectacular views of mountains soaring to the sky and lakes sparkling below. Now, in the dark tunnel, all was confusion. It turned swiftly to chaos when a gun battle broke out at the front of the train, with the crack of pistols, the crash of rifles, and the roar of a 12-gauge as the Overland’s express messenger shot back.

Bell bolted from Tetrazzini’s state room. “Lock the door behind me.”

10

“Gangway!”

Isaac Bell ran full tilt toward the sound of guns echoing in the tunnel.

Smoke darkened the corridor.

Whipping his pistol from his shoulder holster, shouting at passengers in his way, he stormed through the stateroom car and into the forward club car, which rode directly behind the express car. He pushed through the vestibule and pounded on the express car’s fortified door.

“Jake! It’s Isaac Bell. You O.K. in there?”

He had, as was Van Dorn custom, introduced himself to the express messengers who guarded registered mail, bearer bonds, cash, and gold. An extra, armed hand was always welcome, and favors were returned. Bell shouted, “I’ve got the back covered. No gunmen here.”

“Not here, either,” said Jake, unlocking the door. He had a double-barreled sawed-off in his hands and a puzzled expression on his face. “Fire on the tracks, barricade of rocks, and shooting like a war in the tunnel, but I don’t see no—”

Bell turned and ran back to Tetrazzini’s state room, tearing down the narrow corridors along the state rooms, shoving people from his path, praying he wasn’t too late.

Her door was still locked.

Through it he heard glass break and a terrified scream.

Bell levered off the corridor wall, sprang with all his strength, and hurled his shoulder against the door. It flew open, and the tall detective exploded into the state room, gun in his right hand, left fist cocked. He saw Luisa and Rosa on the day couch, seated where he had left them, their backs pressed against the cushions, their faces white with shock.

Through the smoke pouring in, a man materialized. He would have looked like a Gilbert and Sullivan pirate, with a grimy face and a gleaming stiletto clenched in his teeth, except for the Bodeo Italian Army revolver he was using to clear the sash of broken glass. His eyes fixed on Bell. The octagonal barrel flickered toward him. Bell landed a punch on his forehead and he fell backwards. The tunnel was narrow, rough-hewn through the mountain. The killer banged against the stone and slid down between the wall and the train. But as he fell, he managed to pull the trigger. The Bodeo’s .41 caliber slug creased Bell’s neck. It missed his jugular but plowed a fiery furrow in his skin, and the impact of the heavy bullet passing so close nearly knocked him over.

Luisa screamed.

Swaying on his feet, Bell pointed his pistol out the broken window and peered through thickening coal smoke down at the gravel ballast under the car. The man he had punched was struggling to stand. He was still holding his gun, and still had the knife in his teeth. Bell dove out the window, landed beside him, and slugged him with his automatic. This was one Black Hand gangster Isaac Bell had no intention of shooting. This one he would make talk.

The gunman staggered beside the train. Bell tackled him. Still, he tried to run. Bell clamped a hand on one ankle and swung at his knee with the heavy automatic. The man tripped and fell. Bell grabbed his shoulder, but the burning in his neck was draining his concentration. His quarry wriggled loose, over the rail, and under the train. Bell rolled over the rail and spotted him by the flickering of the fire burning ahead of the locomotive. He grabbed the intruder’s foot, and they wrestled in the shallow trough under the car, scraping fists on the splintery crossties and ballast, banging their heads and backs on the chassis.

The locomotive whistled. Three short shrieks were amplified by the rock roof and walls, and Isaac Bell realized that the engineer had to back the train out of the tunnel before his passengers were asphyxiated by the engine smoke. The Black Hander Bell was fighting realized it, too. His eyes glittered on the nearest wheel, three yards from where they struggled. As the air brakes released with a deafening blast, he grabbed Bell’s arm and threw his weight on it to wrench it across the rail.

The train started to roll, and Bell felt the rail and the ties vibrate with the heavy grinding of iron on steel. He fought to free his arm with the little strength he had left. The wheel flange — the iron lip that kept the train on the tracks — was inching down on him like a butcher’s slicing machine. He pounded the man’s kidneys. A heavy coat absorbed the blows, and the Black Hander did not budge. Bell bent his knee, dragged his ankle toward his free hand, and snatched his throwing knife out of his boot. He raised the knife. A protrusion from the moving chassis struck his hand, and the blade started to slip from his fingers. He squeezed hard and plunged it into his assailant’s kidney.

The man convulsed. Bell threw him off, jerked his arm from the rail, and flattened himself in the trough between the tracks. The car passed over him, as did the next stateroom car, the club car, the express car, and the tender. When at last the locomotive rolled away in gusts of steam and smoke, Bell sat up and took stock. He had two working hands. His neck began to ache savagely, and he was breathing hard, gasping to fill his lungs with the thin, smoky mountain air. The man who had stopped the train to attack Luisa Tetrazzini was staring at him with grinning teeth and empty eyes. Oddly, he seemed to have grown taller, until Bell observed that the head glaring blankly at him was on the far side of the rail, severed from its torso.

His stiletto had fallen beside his head.

Bell searched his coat for the sheath, then pocketed the weapon, retrieved his throwing knife, and staggered out of the tunnel.

Marion Morgan, a young, willowy straw-blonde with a beautiful, fine-featured face and a level gaze, was waiting at the railroad ferry pier. Isaac Bell sprang from the boat, ahead of the crowds, and swept her into his arms. “I am so glad to see you.”

They kissed warmly, oblivious to hundreds brushing past. After a while, Marion released him. “I cannot help but notice that you have an enormous bandage on your neck.”

“Cut myself shaving.”

“It looks like you’re still bleeding.”

“Just a scratch.”

“You’re white as a ghost.”

“Excitement… And joy.”

“Shouldn’t you be in a hospital?”

“I should be in bed. What are you doing for the afternoon?”

“But where is your opera singer?”

“I had Bronson’s boys meet the train at Oakland. They’ve got her covered.”

“Then come with me.”

“Where?” The last time he had seen her she was living in a tent, as were most in the earthquake-ravaged and fire-gutted city. From what he had seen from the ferry crossing the bay, not a lot had been rebuilt in the burned districts.

“I borrowed a sweet little cottage from my new boss.”

“What new boss?”

“I just got a wonderful job on a newspaper. I’ll tell you all about it. Later. After we change your bandage.”

In the short time they had been engaged, Isaac Bell had come to trust Marion’s judgment and insight totally. Experienced in business and trained as a lawyer at Stanford — graduating with the first class — she was the only person outside of his fellow detectives with whom he would discuss a case.

“The killer not only found Tetrazzini’s car in a dark tunnel swirling with smoke, but her exact stateroom window. He was well informed. Once again, I feel this so-called Black Hand bunch are considerably more organized than illiterate immigrants straight off the boat.”

“No doubt their leader is,” Marion conceded. “Did the railroad police happen to recognize the killer?”

“No. Why would they?”

“He attacked three thousand miles from New York, and he, or his henchmen, piled stones on the tracks ahead of your train, both of which suggest he was a California man following orders from New York. And he was obviously familiar with the railroad, so I’m wondering whether they had ever arrested him for stealing rides.”

She had changed into a silk robe that complemented her sea-coral green eyes, and Bell watched avidly as she prowled the tiny cottage, refilling their flutes with Billecart-Salmon Brut Rosé champagne and returning to their bed. “What do you think?” she asked.

“I think we should sleep on it.”

A heavy hand pounded the front door.

Marion called, “Who is it?”

“Bronson,” thundered through the wood. “You in there, Isaac?”

“What?”

“Russo’s in Ogden. I’ll slide the telegram under the door.”

Marion said, very sadly, “After I bandage your neck, I’ll ride the ferry with you to the train.”

11

Brewster Claypool was headed for Tammany headquarters, above Tony Pastor’s vaudeville house in an opulent three-story Italianate building on 14th Street, when he heard chorus girls singing Victor Herbert’s latest hit, “I Want What I Want When I Want It.”

He stepped into the theater.

They were rehearsing a spoof with a bandy-legged comedian, who was costumed in a yellow wig and short skirt. Claypool exchanged blown kisses with the girls and got a wave from the comedian, then climbed the stairs with a world-weary smile.

“I Want What I Want When I Want It” summed up with grim precision the job of pulling wires for J. B. Culp.

Boss Fryer — wan, potbellied “Honest Jim” Fryer — greeted Claypool expansively. He would have inquired about his family, if Claypool had one, so asked instead about mutual friends on Wall Street. Claypool reported on their successes and travails, and asked about Honest Jim’s family, who were prospering.

Jim Fryer ran the Tammany Hall political machine that ran New York City. Strict administrator of a party pecking order — district leaders down to election district leaders to block captains to saloonkeepers and building captains — he got out the vote on Election Day in the majorities required to beat the Reformers and dominated a confederation of police, clergy, streetcar magnates, and construction contractors.

They clinked glasses of seltzer lemonade with the fond respect of friends at the top of their games — men who ran cities had not the luxury to drink like elected officials — and traded gossip that others would pay fortunes to hear. Eventually, Fryer, who had a reception room full of cops, contractors, priests, and franchise grabbers waiting to see him, asked Claypool, with only the merest hint of time’s pressure, “To what do I owe the pleasure of your presence?”

“I would like to meet a fellow who can help arrange something unusual.”

The word “unusual” caused Fryer’s eyes to narrow fractionally.

“Brandon Finn’s your man. Tell him I sent you.”

“It could be too unusual for Finn,” Claypool answered carefully.

Boss Fryer stood up. “Brandon will know who to send you to,” he replied, and both men knew the Boss had washed his hands of work best left to henchmen and heelers.

“Run-a! Run-a, Pasquale!”

They were after him again, and Sante Russo ran for his life, wondering why tramps, who were growing thin as food ran out and the first waves of winter cold oozed down the Wasatch Mountains, would waste their strength tormenting a single soul as poor as themselves.

He wanted to turn around and say, I won’t eat much. Just leave me alone.

“Run, you dago!”

The out-of-work miner leading the mob had a pick handle. If they caught him, he would die. An awful voice inside said it might hurt less than running. But he ran anyway, praying he didn’t trip and fall on the rough ground, fleeing the hobo camp, fleeing the hobos and the woods and swamps where they hid from the police.

Russo veered toward a distant creek, hoping the bed was dry enough to cross. But it was deep, the water running hard. They had him trapped. He turned hopelessly to his fate. As if things couldn’t get worse, an enormous automobile suddenly careened out of the gloom, headlights and searchlight blazing. Now it was a race. Who would get to him first? The miner with the pick handle? The second mob, scooping up rocks to throw at him? Or the auto, belching blue smoke as the driver accelerated to run him over? Russo, who had dreamed of someday earning enough money to buy an auto, recognized a fifty-horsepower Thomas Flyer. It was heaped with spare tires, outfitted for crossing rough country. Would they use its tow rope to lynch him from a tree?

Russo was turning to jump in the creek when the driver shouted, “Sante Russo!”

Russo gaped. How did he know his name?

The auto skidded alongside in a cloud of dust. “Get in! On the jump!”

The driver grabbed Russo’s hand and yanked him into the seat beside him. A rock whizzed between them, just missing their heads.

A tall man stepped from the mob with another rock in his hand. He wound up like a professional baseball pitcher, slowly coiling strength in his arm, and began to throw. The driver pulled a pistol from his coat. The gun roared. The pitcher fell backwards.

“Mister?” asked Russo. “Who are you?”

“Bell. Van Dorn Agency… Hang on!”

Isaac Bell depressed the Flyer’s clutch, shifted the speed-changing lever, and stomped the accelerator pedal. Drive chains clattered, and the rear tires churned sand, fighting for a grip. The Flyer lurched into motion, and Bell zigzagged around brush, rocks, and yawning gullies. The bunch he had shot at was backing off. But the main mob, egged on by the guy with a pick handle, was blocking their escape. Bell raised his voice. “I’ll shoot the first man who throws another rock.”

“There’s twenty of us,” the leader bawled. “Gonna shoot us all?”

“Most. Fun’s over. Go home!”

For a moment, Bell thought he had them cowed. Instead, both mobs edged closer. Rocks flew. One grazed his hat. Another bounced off the hood. A third hit the center-mounted searchlight, which exploded, scattering glass. Bell fired inches over their heads, spraying bullets as fast as he could pull the trigger.

Some ran. Others surged forward. He saw a flicker of motion and fired in that direction. A rusty pistol went flying. He sent two more quick shots whistling close to their ears, and his hammer clicked on an empty shell. The mobs were closer, twenty feet away. With no time to reload, Bell shouted for Russo to hold tight and shifted up to third gear.

Two and a half thousand pounds of Thomas Flyer thundered at the mob. All but one man ran. He threw himself at the auto and grabbed at the steering wheel. Isaac Bell flattened him with his gun barrel.

He pressed the accelerator, speeding over rough ground for a quarter mile, and turned onto a dirt track that led toward Ogden. Russo sagged with relief. But when the town hove into view, the Italian asked, “What you want from me?”

“Help with my investigation,” Bell answered and said nothing more until he pulled up in front of a hotel on 25th Street that had a haberdashery on the ground floor. The fact was, he had no idea whether Russo had run from New York because the overcharge that blew up the water mains was an accident, or was sabotage by the Black Hand, or had been laid by Russo himself for the Black Hand.

He led him into the hotel.

The front desk clerk said, “We don’t rent rooms to dagos.”

Bell put a ten-dollar gold piece on the counter and laid his Colt next to it. The gun reeked of burnt gunpowder. “This gentleman is not a dago. He is Mr. Sante Russo, a friend of the Van Dorn Detective Agency. Mister Russo will occupy a room with a bath. And you will send that haberdasher up with a suit of clothes, hose, drawers, and a shirt and necktie.”

“I’m calling the house detective.”

Winter stole into the tall detective’s eyes. The violet shade that sometimes accompanied a smile or a pleasant thought had vanished, and the blue that remained was as dark and unforgiving as a mountain blizzard.

“Don’t if you don’t want him hurt.”

The clerk pocketed the gold piece, the better part of a week’s pay, and extended the register. Bell signed it.

“Tell the haberdasher not to forget to bring a belt. And some shoes. And a handkerchief.”

Bell sat in an armchair while Russo bathed. It had been a long day and night since he left Marion in San Francisco. His wounded neck ached, as did his knees, elbows, shoulder, and hands, from the fight under the train. A knock at the door awakened him. The haberdasher had brought a tailor and a stock boy. They had Russo decked out in an hour.

The blaster marveled at the mirror.

“I am thank-a you very much, Signore Bell. I never look such.”

“You can thank me by taking a close look at this.”

Bell tossed the hollow red tube. Russo caught it on the fly, took one glance, and sat down hard on the bed. “Where you find this?”

“You tell me.”

“Not atta church. Not possible. Nothing left.”

“What do you mean?”

“Big-a bang. Big-a bang ever.”

“Are you saying that this stick could not possibly have been blown clear of that explosion?”

“Not possible.”

Which led Bell to the bigger question. “The sticks you disconnected… were they like this one?”

“Same stick. Where you get?”

“What do you mean the same? You just said it wasn’t possible.”

“Not same, same. Same-a… marca. Marca!” He pointed at the Stevens name printed on the tube. “Where you get?”

“Same brand?”

“Uhhh?”

“Label?”

Russo shrugged.

“Mark?”

“Si. Marca. Where you get?”

“Mano Nero,” said Isaac Bell.

“Same. Yes. Si. Mano Nero make-a overcharge. Like I say.”

On his way to the Ogden train depot Isaac Bell stopped at Van Dorn’s field office. A wire had come in for him on the private telegraph line, Helen Mills reporting triumphantly, in Van Dorn cipher,

Bell wired Mack Fulton and Wally Kisley,

and ran for his train.

He had three days to New York to ponder how the Black Hand case had grown both larger and oddly interconnected. Sante Russo identifying the same dynamite and the Black Handers’ penchant for the same stationery had pretty much confirmed that four separate crimes — kidnapping little Maria Vella, the dynamite overcharge that wrecked her father’s business, bombing Banco LaCava, and the Black Hand attack on Luisa Tetrazzini were engineered by the same gang. And now counterfeiting? A gang of all-rounders? he wondered.

Except that all-rounders did not exist. Criminals were inclined to repeat themselves. Like most people, they stuck with what they knew best and trusted that what had worked before would work again. Strong-arm men intimidated, confidence men tricked, safecrackers blew vaults, thieves stole, kidnappers snatched, bank robbers robbed banks.

Changing trains in Chicago, Bell found a wire from Harry Warren waiting for him on the 20th Century Limited. Harry, too, found all-rounders unusual and said as much in the telegram.

“Ernesto!” said Charlie Salata. “Where you running off to?”

Ernesto Leone’s heart sank. Salata had two gorillas with him and they blocked any hope of escape.

“I’m not running. I’m going home. You know I got a room in this house.”

“Invite me in.”

The four men climbed a flight of stairs. The counterfeiter unlocked his door. The gorillas stayed in the hall. Leone lighted a sputtering gas jet. The broad-shouldered Salata filled the room. Last time he was here, he stole some expensive paper. This time, it seemed to Leone, that he was sucking out the air.

“Listen, Charlie. I told the Boss the money wasn’t ready. He wouldn’t listen.”

“Don’t blame the Boss.”

“I’m not blaming him. I’m just saying… Oh, come on, Charlie. We knew each other since we was kids. You go your way, I go mine, but we’re not enemies.”

Salata slid his fingers inside a terrible set of brass knuckles. A blade jutted from the metal rings. Leone stared at the weapon. Maimed or stabbed? How would Salata do him up?

Salata raised his fist very slowly and pressed the knuckles to Leone’s cheek. Leone could see the blade in the corner of his eye. Salata said, “I got a man in jail. Thousand dollars bail.”

“I’ll get the bail.” Where? He could only wonder.

“What else?”

“What do you mean?”

“What else you going to do to make it up?”

“I’ll do what I can. What do you want? I’m getting better paper. You want part of the new stuff?”

“That was the last time I ever pass false money.”

“Then what?”

“Me and Ferri got something started.”

“Ferri?” echoed Leone. Roberto Ferri was a smuggler. “Since when do you hang with Ferri?”

“Since the Boss said to… You come on this business, make it up to us.”

“What can I do for your business?”

“My guy took a fall. I want you to take a fall.”

“For what? I’m just a counterfeiter.”

“You’re a lousy counterfeiter. But you’re still prominente. Guys know you’re not cafon. If this thing goes wrong, you’ll take the blame.”

“The cops won’t buy that. They know I’m only a counterfeiter.”

Salata pivoted his hand. The knuckles turned away from Leone’s cheek. The blade lined up with his eye. “Not for cops.”

“Van Dorns?”

Salata laughed. “You’ll wish it was Van Dorns.”

Harry Warren was waiting for Isaac Bell on the platform at Grand Central with news of another Secret Service arrest.

“Agent Lynch is having a banner week. Secret Service just pinched a guy passing the same queer upstate.”

“Salata’s?”

“Nope. A Ferri guy.”

“Who’s Ferri?”

“Runs a bunch of smugglers.”

Bell led the way out of the chaotic terminal, dodging work gangs and skirting gaping holes in the concourse floor. “Why’s a smuggler taking chances passing the queer?”

“Odd keeps piling up,” said Warren. “Like I said about Charlie Salata’s boy pinched in Pennsylvania.”

“Same paper?”

“Same queer, same paper.”

“What are the odds that Salata’s turned counterfeiter?”

“Same odds as a grizzly bear hosting a church supper. Anyhow, Agent Lynch told Helen the stuff was lame. The paper. No surprise they got caught. But the engraving was top-notch. Lynch thinks it was done by a guy named Ernesto Leone. Learned his trade in Italy and has trained a bunch of apprentices here.”

“Helen got a lot out of Lynch.”

“She’d given Lynch a description of Leone shopping on Printer’s Row, so I guess Lynch figured he owed her.”

“Did Lynch happen to tell Helen what the prisoners admit to?”

“That smitten he ain’t. Helen asked. He sent her packing.”

“Permanently?”

“’Fraid so. I don’t think we’ll get any more out of the Secret Service.”

The long-legged Bell set a fast pace across town to the office. Harry Warren trotted to keep up.

“You ever hear of this Ferri teaming with Salata?” Bell asked.

“Nope.”

Bell said, “I never heard of an outfit of all-rounders. Birds of a feather is more the rule, but these guys are combining extortion, bombing, counterfeiting, smuggling, kidnapping. Crimes of brute force and crimes of quick wit. Is it an alliance of gangs — a ‘cartel’ of criminals? Or is a single mastermind forcing a variety of gangsters to do his bidding?”

“Damned-near impossible to whip any bunch of crooks into line,” said Warren. “Not to mention different kinds.”

“Cartel or mastermind, they’d be bigger, tougher, and better organized than the small-timers who call themselves Black Hand to scare folks. Makes me wonder what they’ll turn their hands to next.”

“Anything that pays,” said Harry Warren.

Bell said, “Or what they’ll stop at.”

12

A New York Police Department officer wearing a blue coat with shiny brass buttons and a tall helmet strolled the Tenderloin, twirling a nightstick and knocking on brothel doors with printed invitations for the proprietors.

Nick Sayers, proud owner of the Cherry Grove bordello, showed up early at the station house, ahead of his competitors. They trooped in soon after, looking anxious. Sayers waited with a small smile on his face. Captain Coligney’s Pink Teas routinely culminated in orders to “resort keepers” to shut down their “disorderly houses” within twenty-four hours. But unlike his competitors, Nick Sayers had an ace in the hole, information to sell that even “Honest Mike” would buy.

Someone had tipped off the newspapers, of course, and police reporters crammed into Coligney’s office, which was already packed with his invited guests, who were dressed to the nines.

“Will this change anything, Captain Coligney?” demanded the man from the Sun. “Won’t new owners switch names and open up again?”

The broad-shouldered, handsome Coligney was resplendent in dress uniform and amply prepared to deal with the press. “Shutting down the resorts is better and fairer than hauling poor, unfortunate women into the station house, holding them for the night in jail, and dragging them into court before they’re turned loose.”

Having quelled the press, he turned to his guests.

“Gentlemen, and ladies”—he nodded gallantly to several wealthy proprietresses—“we have tea, sandwiches, and cakes, but before we partake, please be aware that you are hereby enjoined to shut down your disorderly houses in twenty-four hours. I don’t want to see an open door or a light in the window after three o’clock tomorrow afternoon.”

Tea was downed, splashed liberally from flasks, sandwiches and sweets consumed, and soon everyone left except the owner of the Cherry Grove.

“Nick,” said Captain Coligney. “Shouldn’t you be off packing your bags?”

“Well, Captain, you would think so, wouldn’t you?”

A note of supreme confidence in Nick’s voice brought the captain up short. “Apparently, you don’t agree, Nick. Care to tell me about it?”

“I would prefer to keep my house open.”

“I would prefer to spend my summers in Newport, but I don’t see it in the cards.”

“I see it in my cards,” said Nick. “And I’m going to play them right.”

“An ace in the hole?” Coligney asked with a dangerous glint in his eye. The bejeweled and cologned Nick was a former “fancy man” who had developed a flair for business that turned a string of streetwalkers into the Ritz of the Tenderloin, and Mike Coligney had heard just about enough.

But Nick stood his ground. “Four aces.”

Coligney formed a fist. “I’m warning you, boy-o, you’re about to run into a straight flush.”

“Captain Coligney, I’m offering you priceless information in return for being allowed to stay open.”

“Priceless?”

“And vital.”

Coligney pointed at the clock on the wall. “Thirty seconds.”

“A secret club meets in my house. Wall Street men. So secret that even you didn’t know about it.”

“What do they do?”

“Drink, talk, carouse.”

“Sounds like all your patrons. Minus the talking.”

“It’s the talking that you will let me stay open for.”

Coligney saw that Nick was in deadly earnest. The brothel owner truly believed that the cops would make an exception for his house. “O.K., spill it. You’ve got thirty seconds.”

“Their secret club. It’s kind of like a joke, but it’s not a joke. These gentlemen run Wall Street.”

“This club have a name?”

“The Cherry Grove Gentlemen’s Society.”

“Original.”

“But, like I say, it’s a joke. Sort of.”

“Your thirty seconds is running out.”

“I listen in on ’em,” said Nick.

“How?”

“There’s a vent shaft for air. I can hear upstairs what they say in the library.”

“A vent which just happened to be there?” asked Coligney. “Or you had built so you could eavesdrop?”

“The latter,” Nick admitted with a grin.

“Why?”

“I listen for stock market tips. I mean, these men know everything before it happens. Twice I made a killing. Once with U.S. Steel, once with Pennsylvania Rail—”

Coligney exploded to his feet, both fists balled. “Are you trying to bribe me with stock tips?”

“No, no, no, no, no! No, Captain. That’s not what I’m talking about. I’m just telling you how I happened to hear it.”

“Hear what?”

Nick took a deep breath and blurted, “They’re going to kill President Roosevelt.”

The police captain rocked back on his heels. Nick looked triumphant that he had captured his attention. Coligney sat back down heavily and planted his elbows on his desk. “What exactly did you hear?”

Nick reported in detail.

“Give me their names.”

“I don’t know their names.”

“They’re your regular customers.”

“I can tell you who was there. But I can’t tell which ones were talking.” Nick explained that he could make out what they were saying but could not distinguish one voice from another, as sounds were distorted by the shaft.

Coligney said, “You must have recognized his manner of speaking.”

“It’s not like there’s only one blowhard in the club, Captain. They’re Wall Street swells, what do you expect? They’re all blowhards.”

Coligney questioned Nick repeatedly. Nick stuck to his story, and eventually the policeman was convinced he did not know who in the “club” had threatened the President.

Coligney wrote down their names. Seven of the richest men on Wall Street.

“O.K.,” said Coligney. “Here’s the deal. You shut down now, like everyone else. You change the name on your deed. You reopen at the weekend.”

Nick nodded. “That way no one knows about this, and it looks like Tammany stepped in and lent me a hand.”

“But if this ends up blarney, you’ll be selling women to blacksmiths in Joisey. Now get outta here.”

Five minutes later, Mike Coligney headed out, too, wearing a greatcoat over his uniform and a civilian’s fedora low over his eyes.

“Back soon,” he told his desk sergeant. “Just going to clear my head.”

“O’Leary’s or the Normandie?” asked the sergeant.

“O’Leary’s.”

But he walked straight by O’Leary’s Saloon. Continuing up Broadway, Coligney passed the Normandie Bar, too, and cut over to Sixth Avenue, thinking hard on what he had learned. “Satan’s Circus” percolated around him as he strode past brick tenements and frame houses, street muggers and stickup artists, dance halls and saloons. Downtown again in the shadow of the El, pondering possibilities and weighing the complications.

The captain had a gut feeling that the plot was real. But as earthshaking as it was, who in blazes could he trust to help him dismantle it? The department was in an uproar. The new Police Commissioner — a friend, ironically, of President Roosevelt — was turning the force on its ear. Worse, Bingham was a stickler for communicating through “proper channels.” Proper channels in this case would be through a politically connected inspector whom Coligney would not trust to solve a candy store theft.

Besides, who knew how long Commissioner Bingham himself would last? Or what disruption he would perpetrate next? For the moment, Coligney was the only precinct captain Bingham hadn’t transferred, but he had fined Coligney eight days’ pay for a technical violation of department rules. What if, in the midst of pursuing Nick’s allegation, he suddenly found himself banished to a sleepy precinct in the Bronx? The grim fact was that the Commissioner, a by-the-book former military man, was not equipped to investigate a plot against the President, much less muster the speed required to save his life.

Coligney stopped in a saloon on 24th Street and placed a call on the owner’s telephone. Then he walked over to Broadway and, when he was sure no one recognized him, popped down the stairs at 23rd and rode the subway train to 42nd Street, where he slipped quietly into the subway-level lower lobby of the Knickerbocker Hotel.

He entered a small, dark cellar bar off the lobby. At a corner table, backs to the walls, were waiting his old friend Joseph Van Dorn and Van Dorn’s top investigator, Isaac Bell.

13

“Let me get this straight,” said Van Dorn when Coligney had laid out his dilemma. “A New York Police Department captain wants to hire my private detective agency to run down hearsay that an unnamed member of a secret tycoon club is threatening to kill the President of the United States.”

“It may be nothing.”

“But if it is not nothing, it is dynamite.”

“I can’t pay cash. You’ll have to take it out in trade.”

“The life of the President, and the well-being of the nation aside,” Van Dorn said drily, “my agency can’t go wrong in the detective business by helping out a high-ranking cop. Particularly one whose career was boomed by this same President back when Mr. Roosevelt was Police Commissioner.”

Van Dorn turned to Isaac Bell.

“What do you think?”

Bell had listened intently, struck by Coligney’s intelligence and clarity, as well as how inventively he was tackling the Bingham complications. “Are you sure,” he asked Coligney, “that your informant did not recognize the man who made the threats by his voice?”

“I interrogated him severely on that subject. I believe that an echo conveyed by the air vent made it impossible to distinguish voices.”

“And he gave you a list of the so-called members of the club?”

Coligney patted his pocket. “Seven of ’em who were there that night.”

Bell was dying to see the names but knew that Coligney would not hand them over until they had come to a firm agreement. He turned to Van Dorn.

“My gut is inclined to agree with Captain Coligney’s gut. The brothel proprietor is likely telling the truth — or at least as much as he knows. He would have to be a lunatic to make up the story out of whole cloth, knowing the police would come down on him with all four feet.”

“He’s no lunatic,” said Coligney. “He’s one smart cookie. It’s no accident he’s prospered uncommonly at his unsavory trade.”

Isaac Bell and Joseph Van Dorn exchanged a glance.

Bell said, “In other words, it’s possible that he did invent the story, reckoning to buy time, gambling you might get transferred like the other captains and a more easygoing fellow be given command of the Tenderloin.”

“It’s possible he’s making it up,” Coligney conceded.

Bell traded another look with Van Dorn. The Boss shook his head. Then he addressed Coligney. “I’ve come to know the President, slightly, while dealing with his Justice Department. He’s sometimes a reckless fellow. But his heart is in the right place.

“The sad fact is, based on the blood-soaked record, the presidency of the United States is a dangerous job. Until proven otherwise, I have to assume the threat is real. Isaac will work up the case.”

“Can’t ask for better than that,” said Coligney. “Good luck, Isaac.” He gave Bell the list and shook his hand. Then he thanked Van Dorn and sauntered out of the cellar bar with a lighter step than he had entered with.

Isaac Bell knew he’d need good luck and then some. He was suddenly working up two cases. The Black Hand was growing bolder every day. And while this new case hinged on the word of a less-than-trustworthy brothel keeper, no one could forget that Theodore Roosevelt himself had been hurled into office less than five years ago, when President McKinley was gunned down by an assassin.

Nick Sayers fingered Isaac Bell’s card suspiciously. “What brings a private detective to the Cherry Grove so early in the morning? Are you seeking a merry end to a long night?”

“A crime has taken place,” said Bell with a significant glance about the extravagantly decorated library.

“Crime?”

“Someone stole Madame Récamier’s dress.”

“What?”

Bell indicated the oversize copy of Jacques-Louis David’s oil painting that dominated the room. A skilled artist had reproduced the portrait of the lady reclining on her couch in every detail except that a thin black headband was the only article of clothing that remained of her original costume.

Bell’s observation elicited an admiring smile from the brothel owner. “You know, Mr. Bell, you’re the first to notice.”

“I imagine your regular guests don’t come for the clothes.”

“What can I do for you, sir?”

“Join me in a private conversation,” said Bell. “Which is to say, not in this library.”

“What?”

“We have a mutual friend in law enforcement.”

Three minutes later, they were hunched over Coligney’s list in Sayers’ private office upstairs. Bell said, “Tell me exactly what you heard.”

“I didn’t pay much attention at first. They were ranting about the President, really tearing into him. But I’d heard it all before. They hate him.”

“But what did you hear?”

“What caught my ear, first, was one of them said, ‘Men of means will have no place in this country if he hangs on long enough to get reelected in ’08.’”

“All right,” said Bell. “Anything else?”

“Nothing for a while. Then some of them moved out of the main library into the little sitting room.”

“How do you know?”

“The sound is louder. I can always tell when someone moves there. And that’s where the good stuff happens. Just a few, trading secrets.”

“Is that where you heard about the U.S. Steel bonds?” Bell guessed, sizing up his witness.

“That’s right!” Sayers answered unabashedly, as if eavesdropping for stock tips was as legitimate a profession as medicine or the pulpit. “That’s why I listen real close when they move in there.”

“What did you hear?”

“Just chitchat, first. Like, ‘Why are you waiting?’ ‘Please sit down.’ Then all of a sudden I heard, ‘My mind is made up. The man must go.’ And someone else said, ‘He’s not just a man. He is the President of the United States.’ Then someone — some other guy, I think — got louder. ‘I don’t care if he’s the King of England. Or the bloody Pope. Or the Almighty Himself. He will destroy us if we don’t get rid of him.’ First guy asked, ‘Is there no other way?’ And then, loud and clear, ‘Theodore Roosevelt will destroy us if we don’t get rid of him.’”

Isaac Bell took Coligney’s list to Grady Forrer, the head of Van Dorn Research. His department occupied back rooms, where a small army of younger scholars was snipping articles from newspapers and magazines, poring through books, and listening intently on telephones.

Forrer read the list in a swift glance, then repeated the names aloud: “Arnold, Baldwin, Claypool, Culp, Manly, Nichols, and Pendergast. A high-flying flock of tycoons.”

“Two or more could be conspiring to kill the President of the United States.”

Forrer, a very large man, raised a skeptical eyebrow bigger than a mustache. “They can afford to hire expensive assassins.”

“Tycoons,” said Isaac Bell, “do not personally hire murderers. Can your boys find me the names of their fixers?”

“It will take some digging to run down who their ‘men’ are. Operatives who pull wires and grease the ways favor the strict Q.T. Double that when recruiting killers from the underworld.”

“I’m stretched thin,” said Bell. “I’ll take all the help you can give me.”

“How are you making out with your ‘cartel of criminals’?”

“The Black Hand Squad is working at it overtime. Trying to link kidnappers, extortionists, bombers, and counterfeiters.”

“I can see why you’re stretched thin.”

Forrer’s face was suddenly aglow with admiration. The long-legged, dark-haired Helen Mills raced into Forrer’s office like a whirlwind. “There you are, Mr. Bell. Hello, Mr. Forrer. Mr. Bell, Mr. Kisley and Mr. Fulton told me to tell you we found Ernesto Leone.”

“Where is he?”

“On the waterfront. 40th Street and Eleventh.”

Bell was already moving through the door. “What’s a counterfeiter doing on the waterfront?”

“Mr. Kisley said he hoped you could figure that out.”

14

Isaac Bell rushed from the Knickerbocker Hotel, caught a crosstown trolley, stepped off when it got hung up in traffic at Tenth Avenue, and hurried down to Eleventh Avenue. Spying a seamen’s shop, he draped his business suit with a secondhand watch coat and removed his derringer from his hat, which he traded for a canvas cap and longshoreman’s loading hook. Three minutes after bursting into the shop, he was dashing down Eleventh Avenue.

Kisley and Fulton met him at 40th Street.

“We got a tip Leone’s been holed up in that rooming house since yesterday. We saw him come down to eat breakfast in that lunchroom, then right back inside. Haven’t seen him since.”

Mack said, “He’s a nervous wreck. He may have made us coming out of breakfast.”

“What’s he doing here?”

“Could be waiting for something to be smuggled off a freighter. Engraving plates from Italy, maybe. There’s a boat in from Naples at Pier 75.”

“There he is!”

Bell saw a thin, dark man edge from the building like a rabbit sniffing the wind.

“I’ll take him. You boys hang back.”

Bell turned away and watched the man’s reflection in a window. Leone hesitated. He looked on the verge of running back into the building. He jerked a watch from his pocket, stared at the time, pocketed the watch, looked around again. Shoulders hunched, he set off briskly toward the river.

The sidewalks were crowded with longshoremen and sailors and streetwalkers. Bell had little trouble staying out of sight as he shadowed him. He followed Leone across 40th Street to where it ended at a basin just above the 37th Street Pennsylvania Railroad Freight Station. The counterfeiter worked his way down the bulkheaded shore back up to 39th Street and suddenly darted to the water’s edge.

Bell saw a boat turn into the slip between the finger piers and arrow toward him. It was a fast steam lighter of the type that delivered provisions to the ships. From the freight pier, two men raced after Leone, their dark features at odds with the neighborhood of fair hair and blue eyes. Leone climbed awkwardly onto the timber apron at the water’s edge. The two men followed him and helped him down to the lighter.

Wally Kisley and Mack Fulton caught up with Bell.

“Those are Charlie Salata gorillas.”

Salata’s gangsters jumped aboard with Leone. The lighter backed into the slip, turned around, and disappeared onto the smoky river.

“Now where’s he going?” said Kisley.

Fulton said, “Out of here before the Irish mob ’em, if they’ve got any sense.”

Bell pointed at the railroad pier. “Go get the dispatcher to telephone the Harbor Squad. Roundsman O’Riordan ought to be at Pier A. Then call the office. Tell ’em to run down Eddie Edwards; he’s working with the New York Central. And warn Harry Warren to watch the Salata hangouts in case they’re headed to Elizabeth Street.”

A livestock boat with tall, slatted sides nosed out of the coal smoke that shrouded the Hudson River. Tugboats shoved it into a Pennsylvania Railroad freight slip. Beef cattle lowed anxiously as deckhands moored it to the pier.

Ed Hunt and Tommy McBean, cousins who ruled the West Side Wallopers, a waterfront gang that preyed on merchant ships and railroad cars, waited inside a delivery wagon for the cows to unload. Hunt and McBean were taking a shot at big-time drug smuggling. A gang brother who had fled the cops and surfaced in Texas had a scheme to smuggle Mexican heroin in hollowed cow horns. The cousins had fronted the dough. Now all they had to do was wait ’til the cows were under cover to take their horns.

They passed the time writing a Black Hand letter to an Italian shopkeeper who could afford to fork over a thousand bucks if sufficiently frightened. They were New York Irish through and through, but you didn’t have to be Italian to send a Black Hand letter. Spreading paper on a barrelhead, they labored by the light of the van’s roof hatch. McBean illustrated it with skulls, knives, guns, and a black hand. Hunt scrawled the threats. They bantered in vaudevillian Italian accents.

“You pay-a de mon-ee?”

“How mooch-a?”

Isaac Bell flashed his Van Dorn badge and slapped five dollars into the hand of a Pennsylvania Railroad detective who tried to stop him. He ran to the end of the railcar float pier that thrust hundreds of feet into the river and climbed the gantry that raised and lowered the dock to align the rails with the barges. Twenty feet up in the air, he scanned the smoky river for the steam lighter that Leone and the Salata gorillas had boarded. It was gone, lost in the heavy traffic of tugs and barges, steamers and sailing ships.

He started to climb back down when he suddenly realized he was looking in the wrong direction. The lighter was nearby, almost at his feet, tied to a cattle boat that was moored alongside the railroad pier. Apparently, it had steamed out of the slip, turned around in the river, and steamed back into the next. Just as he spotted it, a dozen men with bulging sacks slung over their shoulders squeezed through the slats of the cattle boat and jumped onto the lighter. Ernesto Leone was the last aboard. The lighter cast off and steamed into the river, leaving Bell in the same position he had been moments ago, stuck on the gantry while the counterfeiter escaped.

Not quite, he thought to himself. He could see in the distance a New York Police Harbor Squad launch churning up the river at twelve knots. Roundsman O’Riordan, full speed ahead! The Italians spotted the water cops. They turned the lighter on a nickel and raced back into the slip. By the time the Harbor Squad churned into the mouth of the slip, the last of the gangsters were stumbling ashore.

Hunt and McBean’s van driver rapped on the roof with the butt of his carter’s whip.

McBean put down the Black Hand letter and peered through a spy hole. “Here come the cows.”

Hunt watched from an adjacent spy hole. Their laughter died.

“Where’s their horns?” asked McBean.

Of the beef cattle shambling down the gangway to the livestock pens, many had no horns. Some had only one.

“Somebody stole our horns.”

The Irishmen jumped out of the van, faces reddening, fists clenched, and ran to the pens. Hunt vaulted the fence and threw a headlock on the nearest one-horned steer. It tried to buck him off. McBean piled on, too. He couldn’t believe his eyes. Where its horn should have stuck out of its head was a neatly sawn base with a threaded hole in the middle.

“Sons of bitches unscrewed them.”

Their wagon driver ran up.

“Guy says a bunch of Italians just jumped off a lighter.”

“Yeah? So?”

“One of ’em dropped his sack. It was full of cow horns.”

“Where’d they go?”

“Across 36th Street.”

Charlie Salata and his top gorillas found their escape blocked by a long, slow New York Central freight train creeping up Eleventh Avenue at the pace of the city-mandated railroad cop escorting it on a horse. Salata was beside himself. Anything that could go wrong had gone wrong: Harbor Squad cops where they weren’t expected, one of his men gored by a cow, and the boat trapped. At least they had the dope, including the sack that the worthless Ernesto Leone had managed to drop in plain sight of half the waterfront. But they were stuck on foot in Walloper territory, and it was a long way home to Little Italy.

All of a sudden, pounding up 36th Street, came the Wallopers.

15

Isaac Bell stuck close to the Italians he had spotted scrambling off the lighter. Only twenty yards behind when the freight train stopped them, he pressed into a shallow doorway.

There were nine men carrying sacks. Leone had dropped his while jumping ashore, spilling what looked like the horns of cows, before the rest of the gang scooped them up. The counterfeiter was a hapless sight, shooting frightened glances over his shoulder, bumping into the other gangsters, and generally getting in the way. The rest were cool customers, spoiling for a fight.

Bell recognized their leader, Charlie Salata, who had failed to ferret out the disguised detectives on Elizabeth, then sicced a stiletto man on apprentice Richie Cirillo. Running with him was the thug himself, Vito Rizzo, sporting the flattened nose Wish Clarke had smashed on the steps of the Kips Bay Saloon.

Whatever the Italians had stolen or smuggled had caught the attention of the local Irish — West Side Wallopers, Bell surmised by their gaudy costumes, a poisonous outgrowth of the Gopher Gang. A glimpse of their leaders’ scarred faces revealed that Tammany Hall had sprung Ed Hunt and Tommy McBean from prison again.

More Wallopers were joining the pursuit, streaming out of saloons and ten-cent lodging houses. The gang stopped several doorways behind where Bell had taken cover. A sharp, two-finger whistle split the air.

Elaborately coiffed and behatted women ran to them. Shapely as Lillian Russell, hard-eyed as statues, they stood still when the men groped into their bustles and bodices for the revolvers that would get the men arrested when cops patted them down.

The Italians pulled their own guns, all but counterfeiter Leone.

It seemed to Bell that the first shots were fired simultaneously from both sides. Whichever gang shot first, it triggered a fusillade, and the tall detective found himself in the middle of a shooting war. Bullets splintered the wooden jamb, shattered windows, and ricocheted off cobblestones.

Bell drew his pistol in the event a charging Walloper or a counterattacking Salata gangster ran for his doorway. He was reasonably sure he was better armed with his heavy automatic, but there were at least twenty of them, jerking triggers as fast they could, spraying lead like dueling Maxim machine guns. Best to let them get it out of their systems, or at least run out of ammunition. A quick glance down the street confirmed that the Irish were banging away like the Fourth of July, and would be for a while, as their women were tossing change purses filled with fresh bullets.

The tall detective threw another quick glance at the Italians. They were pawing through their sacks for boxes of ammunition and reloading with the speed of men who had been in gunfights before. Bell pressed into his doorway, which was beginning to feel very shallow.

When he heard a lull, he looked again. A glimpse of the Italians offered a sudden opportunity to get his hands on Ernesto Leone. The terrified counterfeiter was attempting to slither away on his belly, hugging the cobblestones and shielding his head with his hands while trying to pull himself along on his elbows. If ever a man was out of place, thought Bell, it was Leone. And if ever a man could shed light on the alliance of extortionists, bombers, kidnappers, smugglers, and counterfeiters, it was Leone.

Bell pivoted out of the doorway. Bullets plucked his sleeve. One burned close to his shoulder. Hugging the buildings, jumping stoops and ash cans, he ran toward Leone, covered the twenty yards in six long bounds, seized the counterfeiter by the scruff of the neck, and hauled him into the closest doorway.

“You’re under arrest.”

“No gun, no gun,” cried Ernesto Leone.

The madman who had rescued him was pointing a pistol in his face and frisking his clothing for weapons. “False money. No gun. No gun.”

For days, Leone had had awful forebodings that someone was following him. He had spotted the shadows. Assuming they were Secret Service agents, he would not make counterfeiting charges even worse by getting pinched with a gun.

“Start talking.”

“What?” Leone could barely hear him over the roar of the battle.

“You owe me your life.”

Leone hung his head. “I know.”

“Who’s your boss?”

“I don’t know.”

Charlie Salata charged into the doorway, gun in hand.

Isaac Bell shot first. Salata jerked his trigger as he fell. The gangster’s bullet tore into Leone’s throat, ripping an artery that fountained blood. Bell dove on him, ripped Leone’s shirttails from his trousers and clamped the cloth around his throat in a stranglehold to try to staunch the bleeding. It was hopeless.

Shotguns boomed. Bell recognized the rapid thunder of humpback 12-gauge Browning Auto-5s and wondered where the gangsters had found such fine weapons. Shouts of fear and men stampeding in every direction meant a third party had joined the battle with a vengeance.

He felt Leone die in his hands.

“Isaac!”

The freight train blocking Eleventh Avenue had rolled away. Italians were running east, Irish and their women running west, and a gang of New York Central Railroad cops were charging up the street, pumping fire from the autoload scatterguns. Leading the cinder dicks was the source of the Brownings, white-haired Van Dorn rail yard specialist Eddie Edwards.

“Heard the gunplay. Figured you’d be in the middle of it.”

“Where’s Salata?” The gangster who had shot Leone was nowhere to be seen.

“Halfway to Little Italy by now.”

“I winged him,” said Bell. “Come on! Let’s get him.”

Elizabeth Street was packed like a festival. The evening was dry and cool, and thousands had streamed from their airless tenements to enjoy the last of autumn out of doors before winter turned nights bitter. A puppet show blocked most of the street with its tall stage. People gathered under its garland of colored lights and spilled off the sidewalks into the street. Traffic was at a standstill. Peddlers were hard-pressed to sell to customers crammed shoulder to shoulder.

Antonio Branco strolled among them wearing a blue suit, a red scarf, and a derby hat. A commotion drew his eye: Charlie Salata, arm in a sling, swaggering behind a gorilla pushing through the crowd. If Salata was expecting a reward for scoring the Wallopers’ dope, he would learn at his next confession that the Boss held him fully at fault for the death of his counterfeiter.

Exchanging pleasantries with the many who recognized him, Branco worked his way toward the puppets. Nearly life-size, with brightly painted faces and colorful costumes, they were visible at a distance, though one had to get close enough to hear the narrator. On the other hand, everyone in the street had known the stories since they were children. He bumped into Giuseppe Vella, who exclaimed, “What a fine night.”

“You look recovered from your troubles.”

Vella shrugged good-humoredly. “A ‘court cost’ here, a ‘contribution’ there, my licenses are returned.”

Branco nodded at the marionettes, arrayed in knights’ costumes. “What is the show tonight?”

“Un’avventura di Orlando Furioso.”

“Roland?” Branco laughed. “Like you and me, my friend. We hold them off while we retreat.”

Vella’s mood darkened. “Look at those gorillas, lording over everyone.”

Rizzo had joined Salata. He had a bandage covering an ear, and his eyes were still blackened from the broken nose the Van Dorns had dealt him. They were shoving through the crowds, knocking people out of the way.

“They act like they own the street,” said Vella.

“Well, in some ways they do, I suppose,” said Branco.

“It shouldn’t be this way.”

“It won’t be always. Buona sera, my friend. I see someone I must say hello to.”

Isaac Bell relied on his height to search the crowd for Charlie Salata. He was still wearing the cap, watch coat, and loading hook he bought on Eleventh Avenue in hopes of blending in. Harry Warren watched fire escapes for signs of a Black Hand ambush. He also kept a close eye on Bell; he had never seen the tall detective so angry, and he knew him well enough to know that he was blaming himself for the loss of the counterfeiter Leone. Ahead stood an impromptu marionette theater, blocking the street. Brightly costumed knights flailed at each other with swords and shields manipulated by rods and strings controlled from a curtained bridge above the stage.

“What are they fighting about?” asked Bell.

“Honor, justice, faith, and women.”

“Like private detectives.”

“Better dressed,” said Warren.

“I hope they’re doing better than we are at the moment.”

Then it struck him. Staring at the puppets, he said, “I believe Ernesto Leone was telling me the truth.”

“About what?”

“He really didn’t know who his boss was.”

“Maybe he didn’t have one.”

“He had one, all right. That’s why Salata killed him.”

“Sicilians don’t talk.”

“I have a feeling Leone wanted to. He’d have told me if he knew.”

“Maybe.”

“Leone wasn’t a killer. A counterfeiter, just a crook. He was grateful I saved his life. But he didn’t know. If I’m right about there being a boss — an overall mastermind — he’s a secret puppet master who knows which strings to pull.”

“How you figure that?”

“Look at those puppets.”

“Yeah?” Harry Warren said dubiously. “What about ’em?”

“Puppets can’t see who’s tugging the strings… Harry! There they are.”

Thirty feet away, Charlie Salata, arm in a sling; Rizzo, too, ear bandaged. They spotted Bell the same instant Bell saw them and jerked pistols from their coats.

A hundred men, women, and children milled between them and the detectives. The crowd was so dense that the only people who could see the weapons were standing beside the gangsters. To pull their own guns would set off a bloodbath.

Charlie Salata knew that. He waved a mocking good-bye. He and Rizzo disappeared behind the puppet stage. Bell went after them. Harry Warren grabbed his arm. “Forget it. They’ll shoot. They couldn’t care less who gets hurt.”

Bell stopped. Warren was right. “O.K. We’ll call it a night.”

Warren turned away. Bell grabbed his shoulder. “Careful, in case you run into them.”

Harry Warren, née Salvatore Guaragna, said, “I know the neighborhood,” and vanished into the crowd.

Bell pretended to watch the puppets, flailing with their swords, while he continued to scan for faces, hoping to recognize Salata’s underlings. Suddenly, behind him, he heard, “Good evening, Detective.”

Bell turned to face Antonio Branco, who asked with a mocking smile dancing across his mobile face, “What brings you to Little Italy in longshoreman’s attire?”

“A Black Hand gangster named Charlie Salata.”

“You just missed him,” said Branco. “Heavyset man with his arm in a sling, shoving people like he owns the street.”

“I know what he looks like.”

“He went behind the puppets.”

“I saw,” said Bell. “There are too many people. Too many could get hurt.”

“Your innocent Italians,” said Branco. “I’m beginning to believe that you really mean that.”

“Mean what?”

“That you can turn cafon and contadino into Americans.”

“What are cafon and contadino?”

“Barefoot peasants.”

“We’ve done it before, we’ll do it again. Meantime, what are you going to do for them?”

“I find them work. And I feed them.”

“That’s only a start,” said Isaac Bell. “You’re a man of substance, a prominente. What will you do when criminals prey on them?”

“I am not a cop. I am not even a detective.”

“Why don’t you get behind your White Hand Society?”

“That did not work out so well, did it?”

Bell said, “Do it in a bigger way. Put in more money, put in more effort, use your talents. You’re a big business man; you know how to organize. You might even make it a national society.”

“National?”

“Why not? Every city has its Italian colony.”

“What an interesting idea,” said Antonio Branco. “Good night, Detective Bell.”

“Do you remember the knife you pulled on me in Farmington?”

“I remember the knife I opened to defend myself.”

“Was it a switchblade? Or a flick-knife?”

Branco laughed.

“What’s so funny?”

“You have the manner of a man born to privilege. Am I correct?”

“Assume you are,” Bell said.

“I laugh because you think an immigrant laborer would dare carry an illegal weapon. Your government called us aliens — still does. A switchblade or a flick-knife would get us beaten up by the police and thrown in jail. It was a pocket knife.”

“I never saw a pocket knife open that fast.”

“It only seemed fast,” said Branco. “You were young and afraid… So was I.”

16

A voice in the dark shocked Tommy McBean out of his sleep.

“What?”

“Listen.”

“Who the hell are you?” McBean reached for the gun under the pillow. It wasn’t there. That’s what he got for going to bed drunk in a strange hotel with a woman he never met before. She was gone like his gun. Big surprise. She had played him like a rube.

Boiling mad, ready to kill with his bare hands, if he could only see the guy, he sat up in bed and shouted, “What do you want?”

“We have cow horns.”

“Oh yeah?” Tommy shot back. “You have my dope? Who the hell are you going to sell it to?”

“We have buyer who pay-a top doll-a.”

The guy talked like an Eye-talian. Another damned guinea. More every day. “Who?”

“Top doll-a.”

“Who, damn you?”

“You.”

“Me? What are you talking about?”

“We no steal your heroin.”

“You just said you did.”

“We no steal it. We kidnap it.”

McBean swung his feet to the floor. Cold steel pressed to his forehead. He ignored it and made to stand up. Then he felt a needle prick between his ribs, and the voice in the dark said, “I’m-a four inches from inside your heart.”

McBean sagged back on the bed. “Ransom? You’re holding our dope for ransom?”

“You make-a distributor system. You sell it.”

“You ‘make-a’ war on us.”

The Italian surprised him, saying, “You win-a the war.”

“Better believe it.”

“Not how you think. You make-a Fordham College. You make-a Boston University. Me? Steamer Class for stupid dago.”

“What are you gassin’ about?”

“I have more hungry men than you. Micks move up. Dagos just start. Ten years, you all be college men. Ten years, we own the docks.”

“You’ll never own the docks.”

He laughed. “We make-a side bet. After you pay-a ransom.”

“What if I don’t?”

“We dump drugs in river.”

“Geez… O.K. How much?”

“Half value.”

“I gotta talk to my cousin.”

“Ed Hunt said no deal.”

“Ed already said no deal? Then no deal.”

“Hunt died.”

“Ed’s dead?”

“Do we have deal?”

Tommy McBean could not imagine Ed Hunt dead. It was like the river stopped. And now the Wallopers was all on him.

“What killed him?”

“It looked like a heart attack.”

Antonio Branco walked from the waterfront to Little Italy.

They would be bloody years, those ten or so years to take the New York docks. The Irish would not let the theft of their drugs and the killing of Hunt go by without striking back. Chaos loomed and pandemonium would reign.

At Prince Street, he went into Ghiottone’s Café, as he often did. The saloon was going strong despite the hour. Ghiottone himself brought wine. “Welcome, Padrone Branco. Your health… May I sit with you a moment?”

Branco nodded at a chair.

Ghiottone sat, covered his mouth with a hairy hand, and muttered, “Interesting word is around.”

“What word?”

“They are shopping for a killer,” said Ghiottone.

“The grocer” can’t fool everyone. Especially a saloon keeper who works for Tammany Hall. Cold proof of the chaos that threatened every dream.

“Why do you tell me this?”

Ghiottone returned a benign smile. “A padrone recruits employees. Pick and shovel men. Stone masons. In your case, you even recruit padrones. Who knows what else?”

“I don’t know why you tell me this.” Did Ghiottone know how close he was walking to death?

“Are you familiar with the English word ‘hypothetical’?” Ghiottone asked.

“What ipotetico are you talking about?”

Ghiottone spread his hands, a signal he meant no harm. “May we discuss ipotetico?”

Branco gave a curt nod. Perhaps the saloon keeper did know he was close to death. Perhaps he wished he hadn’t started what couldn’t be stopped.

“The pay is enormous. Fifty thousand.”

“Fifty thousand?” Branco couldn’t believe his ears. “You could murder a regiment for fifty thousand.”

“Only one man.”

“Who?”

“They don’t tell me. Obviously, an important figure.”

“And well-guarded. Who is paying the fifty thousand?”

“Who knows?”

“Who is paying?” Branco asked again.

“Who cares?” asked Ghiottone. “It came to me from a man I trust.”

“What is his name?”

“You know I can’t tell you. I would never ask who brought the job to him. Just as he would never ask that man where it came from. In silence we are safe.”

What blinders men wore. “Kid Kelly” Ghiottone seemed unable to imagine that he was linked — like a caboose at the end of a speeding train — to a titan who could pay fifty thousand dollars for one death. Branco pictured in his mind jumping from the roof of that caboose to the freight car in front of it, and to the next car, and the next, running over the swaying tops, one to another to another, all the way to the locomotive.

“They came to you,” Branco mused. “Why do they come to an Italian?”

Ghiottone shrugged. Branco answered his own question. The conspirators wanted someone to take the blame, a killer who is completely different from the titan who wanted the victim dead. What better “fall guy” than a crazed Italian immigrant? Or an Italian anarchist.

“What do you say?” asked Ghiottone.

Branco sat silent a long time. He did not touch his glass. At last he said, “I will think.”

“I can’t wait long before I ask another.”

Antonio Branco fixed the saloon keeper with the full force of his deadly gaze. “I don’t believe you will ask another. You will wait while I think about the man you need.”

“Fifty thousand is a fortune,” Ghiottone persisted. “A third or a half as a finder’s fee would still be a fortune.”

Branco stood abruptly.

“What’s wrong?” asked Ghiottone.

“This is no place to discuss such business. Wait ten minutes. Come to the side entrance to my store. Make sure no one sees you.”

Branco made a show of thanking him for the wine and saying good night as he left the crowded saloon.

“Kid Kelly” Ghiottone waited five minutes, then walked across Prince Street and down an alley. Looking about to see that no one was watching, he knocked at the grocery’s side entrance.

Antonio Branco led him through storerooms that smelled of coffee, olive oil, good sausage, and garlic, and down a flight of stairs into a clean, dry cellar. He unlocked a door, said, “No one can hear us,” and led Ghiottone into a room that held an iron cage that looked like the Mulberry Street Police Station lockup from which Ghiottone routinely bailed out fools in exchange for their everlasting loyalty.

“What is this? A jail?”

“If a man won’t repay the cost of getting him to a job in America, he’ll be held until someone pays for him.”

“Ransom?”

“You could call it that. Or you could call it fair trade for his fare.”

“But you hold him prisoner.”

“It rarely comes to that. The sight of these bars alone focuses their mind on repaying their obligation.”

Ghiottoni’s eyes roved over the thick walls and the soundproof ceiling.

Branco said, “But if I must hold him prisoner, no one will hear him yell.”

He exploded into action and clamped Ghiottone’s arm in a grip that startled the saloon keeper with its raw power. Ghiottone cocked a fist, but it was over in a second. Outweighed and outmaneuvered, the saloon keeper was shoved into the cell with a force that slammed him against the back wall. The door clanged shut. Branco locked it and pocketed the key.

“Who asked you to hire a killer?”

Ghiottone looked at him with contempt and spoke with great dignity. “I already told you, Antonio Branco, I can never betray him, as I would never betray you.”

Branco stared.

Ghiottone gripped the bars. “It’s fifty thousand dollars. Pay some gorilla to do the job for five — more than he’ll ever see in his life — and keep the rest for yourself.”

Antonio Branco laughed.

“Why do you laugh?” Ghiottone demanded.

“It is beyond your understanding,” said Branco.

Fifty thousand was truly a fortune. But fifty thousand dollars was nothing compared to the golden opportunity that Ghiottone had unwittingly handed him. This was his chance to vault out of “pandemonium” into a permanent alliance with a titan — escape chaos and join a powerhouse American at the top of the heap.

“I ask you again, who brought this to you?”

Ghiottone crossed his arms. “He has my loyalty.”

Branco walked out of the room. He came back with a basket of bread and sausage.

“What is this?”

“Food. I’ll be back in a few days. I can’t let you starve.” He passed the loaf and the cured meat through the bars.

“Kind of you,” Ghiottone said sarcastically. He tore off a piece of bread and bit into the sausage. “Too salty.”

“Salt makes good sausage.”

“Wait!”

Branco was swinging the door shut. “I will see you in a few days.”

“Wait!”

“What is it?”

“I need water.”

“I’ll bring you water in a few days.”