The Gangster

45

Antonio Branco’s stiletto pierced Isaac Bell’s coat and jacket and vest, ripped through his shirt and stopped with a shrill clink of iron and steel.

“What?” gasped Antonio Branco.

“I borrowed your partner’s chain mail,” said Isaac Bell and hit the gangster with all his might.

Antonio Branco flew backwards into the crowd.

His arms shot in the air, his knife tumbled from his hand, his eyes glazed. Men pounced on the stunned gangster and wrestled him back on his feet.

“Well held,” shouted Roosevelt. “Bring the scoundrel here.”

They yanked him deeper into the crowd.

Isaac Bell was already plunging in after them, with Van Dorn right behind him.

The Black Hand formed a protective cordon and ran like a football flying wedge, with the heaviest men in the lead and Branco safe within. Laborers scattered out of their way. Those who tried to stop them were steamrollered to the ground.

Four more gorillas blocked Bell and Van Dorn in a maneuver as strategic as the flying wedge. The detectives pounded their way out of the slugfest, but by then Antonio Branco and his rescuers were far down the hill, running toward the railroad tracks.

Bell ran full speed after them. Van Dorn fell behind. He couldn’t keep the younger man’s pace, and Bell shouted over his shoulder that Eddie Edwards was watching Culp’s train. “Cut straight to the yards. I’ll stick with Branco.”

Branco appeared to have recovered from Bell’s punch. He was running under his own steam now, wing-footing, yet drawing ahead of his Black Hand guard. Suddenly, he veered away from the train yards, crossed the railroad tracks, and ran directly to the river.

His men stopped, turned around, and fanned out to face Isaac Bell.

The tall detective pulled his pistol and opened fire, dropped the two closest to him, and charged through the gap in their line. He did not waste ammunition on Branco, who was out of range and running so purposefully that Bell wondered whether J. B. Culp had managed to sneak his Franklin out of the estate right under the Van Dorn noses.

He reached the track embankment and climbed to the rails. From that slight elevation, he saw Branco had planned an emergency escape even faster than an auto or a train. The ice yacht Daphne waited at the riverbank. At the helm, the bulky figure of J. B. Culp urged him to run faster. Antonio Branco hurtled, slipping and sliding, down the final slope, with Isaac Bell drawing close.

The gangster fell, slid, rolled to his feet, and vaulted into the car beside Culp.

Culp flipped the mooring line he had looped around a bankside piling and sheeted in his sail. The tall triangle of canvas shivered. But Daphne did not move. Her iron runners had frozen to the ice.

Bell put on a burst of speed. He still had his gun in hand.

Culp scrambled out of the car and kicked the rudder and the right-hand runners, yelling frantically at Branco to free the runner on his side. Bell was less than fifty feet away when they broke loose.

“Push!” Bell heard Culp shout, and the two men shoved the ice yacht away from the bank. The wind stirred her masthead pennant. Her sail fluttered. One second, Branco and Culp were pushing the ice yacht; the next, they were running for their lives, trying to jump on before she sped away from them.

Bell was on the verge of trying to stop and plant his feet on the ice to take a desperate shot with the pistol before they got away. But as her sail grabbed the wind and she took off in earnest, he saw the mooring line dragging behind her. He ran harder and dived after it with his hand outstretched.

The end of the mooring line was jumping like a cobra. He caught it. A foot of rope burned through his hand before he could clamp around it. Then a gust slammed into the sail, and the rope nearly jerked his arm out of his shoulder, and, in the next instant, the big yacht was dragging him over the ice at thirty miles an hour. He flipped onto his back and stuffed his gun in his coat and then held on with both hands. He had hoped the extra weight would slow the yacht, but as long as the wind blew, she was simply too powerful. Now his only hope was to hang on for another quarter mile. The yacht was racing downriver. So long as Culp didn’t change course, it was dragging Bell toward his own ice yacht, which he had tied up near Cornwall Landing.

The mooring line was less than twenty feet long, and Bell heard Culp laugh. Branco was poised to cut the line. Culp stayed him with a gesture, pointed at a clump of ridged ice, and steered for it.

“Cheese grater coming up, Bell.”

Daphne’s runners rang on the ridges and an instant later Bell was dragged over the rough. He held tight as it banged his ribs and knees.

“Another?”

One more, thought Bell. He could see his boat now. Almost there, and Culp inadvertently steered closer, intent on aiming for an even higher ridge to shake him off when Daphne slammed over it. Bell let go, freely sliding, swinging his legs in front of him to take the impact with his boots, hit hard, sprang to his feet, and staggered to his boat.

“He’s coming after us,” said Branco.

“Let him.”

Culp slammed his yacht skillfully into a deliberate crash turn. It spun her a hundred eighty degrees and put them on a course up the river, with the west wind abeam, the lightning-quick Daphne’s best point of sail.

“What went wrong back there?”

“I don’t know,” said Branco.

“Is that all you have to say for yourself?”

Branco was eerily calm and entirely in possession of himself. “I’ve lost a battle, not a war.”

“What about me?”

“You’ve lost a dream, not your life.”

“They will come after me,” said Culp.

“Nothing can be pinned to you that would nail you.” Branco reached inside his coat, and a stiletto gleamed in his hand. “But if you are afraid and are thinking of selling me out to save yourself, then you will lose your life. Take the pistol out of your coat by the barrel and hand it to me, butt first.”

Culp was painfully aware that they were only two feet apart in the tiny cockpit and he had one hand encumbered by the tiller. At the speed they were moving, to release the tiller for even one second to try to block the stiletto could cause a catastrophic spinout. “If you kill me, who will outrun Bell?”

“That will be between Bell and me.” He gestured imperiously with the blade.

Culp said, “I’ll want it back if Bell gets closer. I’m sure I’m a better shot than you.”

“I’m sure you are. I never bother with a gun,” said Branco. “Give it to me!”

Culp saw no choice but to relent. Branco shoved it in his coat.

“Tell me where you are taking me.”

“Option three, as I promised, is to sail you to the Albany rail yards. I have a special standing by. Or if you don’t think it’s safe, you can steal a ride on a freight train.”

“How far?”

“At this rate, we’ll make it in two hours.”

Antonio Branco glanced over his shoulder. “Bell is closer.”

“It will be dark soon,” said Culp. “And Isaac Bell does not know this river like I do.”

Isaac Bell’s ice yacht raced up the Hudson River, vibrating sharply, tearing through patches of fresh snow, flopping hard when the runners banged over ice hummocks, and jumping watery cracks where the tide had lifted the ice. She was heavier than Culp’s boat — built of white ash, instead of aluminum, and carrying lead ballasts Bell had strapped to the outsides of her runner plank to hold her down in the squall winds. Using the extra pounds and her oversize sail to advantage, he veered off course to increase velocity on a favorable beam wind, then glided back on course, with her extra weight sustaining momentum.

Bell thought it was strange that an experienced racer like Culp wasn’t using the same tactic when he saw him catching up. If the magnate was trying to lure him into pistol range, he would get his wish.

By the time the speeding yachts had whipped past the lights of Newburgh, Bell had drawn within a hundred yards. He could see Branco and Culp in the cockpit, their faces white blurs as they looked over their shoulders to gauge his progress in the fading light.

Culp changed course abruptly.

Half a second later, Bell saw a horse right in front of him.

46

It was a tremendous plow horse, plodding in harness, and it reared in terror as Isaac Bell’s sail bore down on it. Appearing so suddenly, at sixty miles an hour, and seen from a cockpit twelve inches above the ice, it looked as big as Culp’s stuffed grizzly.

Isaac Bell yanked his tiller.

Culp had led him into the middle of an ice harvest. Men and horses were plowing grooves in the ice and cutting it into cakes to be stored for next summer. They had sawed open a wide patch of open water that gleamed black as coal.

Bell’s boat skidded violently. Centrifugal force nearly flicked him out of the cockpit. The boat was sliding sideways, out of control, and headed straight at the black water. Ten feet from it, Bell’s runners bit the ice again, his rudder responded, and he skittered the boat along the edge, dodged another horse and plow, and hurled himself back on course, his eyes locked on the tall white triangle of Daphne’s sail.

Another mile flashed by.

He caught the beam wind again and gained some more. When only forty yards separated the yachts, he locked a leg over the tiller, drew his automatic, braced it with both hands, and waited until the runners were humming steadily over a smooth patch. When he opened fire, he missed, but not by much, and it had the desired effect. Antonio Branco did not even flinch, but J. B. Culp ducked from the slugs whistling past his ears. He lost control and Daphne spun out, whirling in circles and dropping speed. Bell’s boat passed her before he could untangle his leg and steer to a stop.

Culp recovered, caught the wind, and took off like a rocket.

Bell tore after him, closer than before. You’re not as bold as you think you are, thought Bell. He saw Branco hand something to Culp. The next instant, flame lanced as Culp fired the pistol Branco had given him. Lead thudded into Bell’s mast. A bullet whined close to his face.

Daphne’s runners and rudder left the ice and she was suddenly airborne. An instant later, Bell hit what had launched her — a snowdrift ramped up by the wind and frozen solid. His boat flew, soaring high and far. It felt like she would fall backwards, but the lead weights strapped to her runner plank balanced her and she landed back on the ice, upright and racing ahead.

Before she crashed back down again, Bell glimpsed in the distance another ice harvest. They were finishing for the day. The men and horses were near shore, loading the cakes into an icehouse. All that remained where they had worked in the middle of the river was the open cut. Black water stretched the length of a football field.

Bell fired a shot to distract Culp and veered his yacht to build speed. When he had, and was racing parallel to Daphne, he suddenly changed course and drove straight at her. The sight of Bell’s enormous sail suddenly flying at him unnerved J. B. Culp and he reflexively jerked his tiller to steer away before the yachts collided. The violent turn spun his in a circle.

She pinwheeled beyond his command — sliding and spinning on the slick surface — flew off the ice, and slammed into the black water. The impact of the abrupt stop from fifty miles an hour to zero snapped both legs of her double mast. Boom, yard, and sails crashed down on her runner plank, which was sinking quickly and already half submerged.

Isaac Bell skidded his yacht to a halt twenty feet from the abyss and dropped his sail. The masterminds of a national crime organization were his at last. Only drowning could save them from justice.

He ran to the brink with a rope in one hand and his gun in the other.

The sea tide had turned. Receding swiftly downstream in tandem with the Hudson’s powerful current, it seized Daphne’s fallen rigging. The river filled her sail, as if with a watery wind, and dashed the shattered yacht against the solid ice at the edge of the cut.

Branco and Culp battled their way out of the tangle of rigging and canvas and tried to climb off. The current forced her bowsprit under the ice. A stump of her mast caught on the edge. The wreckage hung motionless for a heartbeat, then continued sliding under as it sank.

Isaac Bell threw his rope.

J. B. Culp caught it and clambered onto the ice shelf. Antonio Branco was right behind him, heaving himself toward safety even as the boat slid under. He planted one foot on solid ice, teetered backwards, and caught his balance by grabbing Culp’s coat.

Bell dug in his heels, fighting to keep from sliding as he took the weight of both men. The rope jerked in his hands. Through it, he could feel Culp gather his full strength. Suddenly, the magnate whirled about. His leg levered up like a placekicker’s. His boot smashed into Branco’s gut and threw him backwards into the water.

The expressions on Branco’s mobile face flickered like a nickelodeon. Disbelief. Rage. Abject terror in the split second before the river sluiced him under the ice.

Isaac Bell leveled his gun at J. B. Culp, who was still holding the line the detective had thrown to him. “John Butler Culp, you are under arrest. Get on my boat and tie that rope around your ankles.”

The tall, broad-shouldered patrician glanced disdainfully at Bell’s gun. Then he pointed at the black water that had swallowed Antonio Branco.

“Evidence of your vague allegations against me is scanter than ever now. Besides, everyone saw Branco try to kill the President. They’ll all agree that drowning was a well-deserved death for the dago gangster.”

“But now I’ve got you for murder,” said Isaac Bell. “Saw it with my own eyes. I’ll bet, ten-to-one, that the judge and jury will agree on the electric chair for the American gangster.”