The Gangster

26

The streets were crawling with cops and Van Dorns.

Antonio Branco stepped from a tenement doorway, hurried twenty feet to Banco LaCava, and tapped his signet ring on the glass. David LaCava looked up from the gold he was stacking in his show window. Branco watched his expression and got ready to run. LaCava saw Branco. He gaped, shocked. Then relief spread across his face and he ran to unlock the door.

“You’re alive!”

Branco pushed through and closed it behind him.

“They said you were missing in the explosion.”

Branco made a joke to lull the banker. “Almost as bad. I was upstate in the Catskills.” Then he turned fittingly grave. “I came back on the night boat. I only heard of the explosion this morning when we docked.”

“How bad is it?”

“I couldn’t see. The cops and firemen and sewer and building departments are squabbling over who commands the recovery. Fortunately, none of my people were in my building. But they say some poor souls are trapped in the tenements.”

“There’s a rumor Isaac Bell was in the building.”

“I heard that, too — God knows what he was doing there. Here! Take these.” He thrust a wad of paper into LaCava’s hands.

“What is this?”

“Receipts and bills of lading for a pier house full of wine I stored on West 21st Street. You can see my situation. All my store stock is lost. I need to borrow cash to fill orders for the aqueduct.”

“Is Prince Street insured?”

“It will take time to get the money and I need to buy new stock now. Total these up; you’ll see the wine’s worth fifty thousand. Can you advance me thirty?”

“I wish I could, my friend. I don’t have that much on hand. My depositors are only trickling back.”

“Whatever you can lend me right now… Immediately.”

Ten minutes after the grocer left with a satchel of cash, grim-faced detectives from the Van Dorn Black Hand Squad burst into the bank.

“Have you seen Antonio Branco?”

David LaCava said, “You just missed him. May I ask, is there any word on Mr. Bell?”

“No. Where did Branco go?”

“To buy stock. He has orders he must fill for the aqueduct.”

Harry Warren and Eddie Edwards stared at the banker.

“Aqueduct?” Warren echoed.

“What are you talking about, Mr. LaCava? Branco’s not filling orders; he’s on the run.”

“What do you mean?” asked LaCava.

“The thieving murderer blew up his own store,” said Warren.

“We hoped he was buried in it,” growled Eddie Edwards. “But someone saw him on the street headed this way.”

LaCava turned paper white as the blood drained from his face. “Basta!”

Harry Warren gripped the banker’s shoulder. “What’s wrong?”

“I didn’t know. Everybody said it was an accident.”

“‘Everybody’ was wrong. He blew it up, along with three buildings next door and half the graveyard.”

“I just lent him twenty thousand dollars… But I have these! Don’t you see? Collateral. You are mistaken. He is Antonio Branco. He has the Catskill Aqueduct contract.”

“Honest as the Lottery?”

“But these bills of lading—”

The Van Dorn snatched them out of his hand.

Clad like a rich merchant, in a blue topcoat, a red scarf, and a derby hat, Antonio Branco tallied wine barrels on a Hudson River freight pier at 22nd Street. Stevedores were rolling them up the gangway onto a coaster about to sail for Philadelphia. The ship’s captain stood beside Branco and they counted the barrels together. When the last were stowed in the hold, the captain gave Branco bills of lading attesting that the fifty-thousand-dollar cargo was aboard his ship.

Branco hurried two blocks to a wine broker who had already agreed to buy the bills of lading at a discount. Then he took the ferry across the river to Jersey City and walked to a laundry that served the working class neighborhood. The proprietor, a tiny old Chinaman with a misshapen face and a blinded eye, sorted through paper-wrapped packages of clothes never picked up and sold him a pair of rugged trousers, a short coat, and a warm watch cap that wouldn’t blow off in the wind.

A thoroughly disgusted Harry Warren stared long and hard at the empty slip from where a coaster had departed an hour earlier. Eddie Edwards stomped out of the pier house, looking equally fed up.

“First the ice-blooded scum takes LaCava for twenty grand cash. Then he sashays across town, big as life, and leaves the pier here with fifty grand in bills of lading, according to the clerk in the pier house, for the same wine that he can turn to another quick thirty thousand cash — bills of lading being damned-near legal tender.”

“On the lam with enough money to charter a private train.”

“Or an ocean liner.”

The detectives exchanged another black look, knowing that neither had exaggerated the value of Branco’s haul. Fifty thousand dollars would buy a country estate, with servants, gardeners, gamekeepers, and a chauffeur to drive the lucky owner home from the railroad station.

“Now what?”

“Jersey City.”

“What’s there?”

“Fellow in there sent a boy after him. One of the bills had fallen off the pile. The kid spotted him on the ferry too late. It was pulling out of the slip.”

Branco changed clothes in the Jersey Central Communipaw Terminal men’s room and left those he had been wearing by a church, where some tramp would run off with them soon enough. He bought a surplus Spanish-American War rucksack to carry his cash and field glasses and ditched his fancy leather satchel. He gorged on a huge meal in a cheap lunchroom and rented a room in a ten-cent lodging house. He studied freight and passenger train schedules. Finally closing his eyes for the first time since he had killed Brewster Claypool, he slept soundly until dark. He ate again — forcing himself to cram his belly while he could — then followed his ears toward the clamor of steam pistons, switch engine bells, and locomotive whistles rising from the New Jersey Central train yards.

It was a cold, dark night, with a cutting wind under an overcast sky. Row upon row of parked trains sprawled under a swirling scrim of smoke and steam. Countless sidings merged from the freight car float piers and passenger terminal that rimmed the Hudson River into four separate sets of main lines leaving the city.

Branco tried to choose his train from a street that overlooked one of the lines. But there were hundreds of lines, and thousands of freight cars — an ocean of lanterns, sidelights, and headlamps — screened by electric and telegraph wires and poles. He noticed a disused switching tower in the middle of the dimly lit chaos that would give him a better perspective.

An empty lot behind a fence sloped down to the tracks. Skirting yard lights, dodging headlamps, watching for rail bulls, he climbed between cars at their couplings and worked his way across a score of sidings to the dark tower. A fixed ladder led to its roof, where he swept the yard with his field glasses.

Van Dorns were watching.

He spotted one slipping money to the regular yard bulls — recruiting man hunters. The detective gave himself away with an appearance that was a mighty cut above the regular rail cops and an expression of cold rage, mourning his precious Isaac Bell.

Branco was not surprised. Any detective worth his salt carried the same railroad maps in his mind as he did and knew that for a man running to distant jurisdictions, Jersey City was the place to start. Scores of rail lines fanned south and west to Philadelphia, Baltimore, Pittsburgh, Chicago, St. Louis, San Francisco — each city home to a teeming Italian settlement.

The Van Dorns also knew that he couldn’t risk riding as a paying passenger scrutinized by ticket clerks, platform guards, porters, and conductors. Trapped aboard a speeding flyer, no matter how fast, he could never beat a telegraph bulletin to the next station. So they would search all the places he would try to steal a ride: on the reinforcing rods underneath a car; or on top, clinging to a roof; or sheltered from the cold inside an unlocked boxcar; or riding “blind” platforms in front of baggage cars.

From the many trains that the switch engines were making up, he picked out a fast freight headed by a powerful camelback 2-6-0 locomotive. It consisted of flatcars carrying mining machines, empty coal hoppers, and reefers of fresh beef from the Jersey City slaughterhouses. Branco judged by the number of cars, some thirty that the busy switch engines had already shunted to it, that it would soon be highballing for Pennsylvania’s anthracite coalfields — first stop, Bethlehem Junction.

He edged toward the ladder, only to be distracted by a passenger train that emerged from the Communipaw Terminal and snaked slowly through the yards, its windows a warm russet glow in the bitter cold. The hour and the 4-4-2 locomotive towing twin baggage cars, four Pullmans, and a club car, said it was probably the crack Harrisburg flyer, “Queen of the Valley.” Branco imagined the passengers settling into deep armchairs with cocktails in hand and every expectation of sleeping in their own beds by midnight. Motion of a different kind jolted him out of his reverie.

A man on foot was striding the crossties of a siding that curved beside the tower.

Switch yard brakeman? Rail cop? Hobo? Ignoring the locomotives steaming around him, he was coming Branco’s way as purposefully as a lion stalking prey through a herd of elephants. No hobo walked like that; no brakeman, either. He had to be a rail cop or, worse, an alert Van Dorn who had spotted the empty switch tower for a fugitive’s spy house.

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

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

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

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

“Get off!”

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

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

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

The platform was empty.

He looked up. Branco had climbed onto the roof.

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

The roof was empty.

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

Antonio Branco climbed a slope out of the Jersey Central rail yards into a neighborhood condemned by the ever-expanding railroad and raced across town through dark streets of boarded-up tenements. Of the four lines he had seen leaving the city, there was one to the north of the Queen of the Valley’s Harrisburg line. It was the Scranton line — the line he had wanted all along but did not want the Van Dorns to know he was riding. When he reached it — down an embankment and over a fence — he looked for the train he had chosen earlier.

Sorriso di Dio! Fortune smiled. There — the distinctive humped silhouette of the camelback center-cab 2-6-0 locomotive. The fast freight was made up and rolling, shunting out of the yard. He ran ahead, along the main line. The beam of its headlight threw shadows from his heels. He dove into the shallow trench beside the tracks and hid. The engine thundered past, straining to accelerate, in clouds of smoke and steam.

Branco sprang into the cloud and galloped beside the moving train. The reefer cars would be full, doors locked. Empty coal hoppers were deadly in the cold wind. Looking over his shoulder, he spied a flatcar on which a steam shovel was chained like a captive. He slowed to let the car overtake him and jumped aboard.

Nurses lingered.

“Handsome devil.”

“What do you suppose he’s thinking?”

“What makes you think he’s thinking at all…?”

Physicians argued.

“Coma—”

“I say stupor.”

“Coma: laceration of the brain; capillary hemorrhage; lesion.”

“The brain is a tissue. It has a capacity for healing.”

“Lividity of the tongue and lips. Embarrassed respiration.”

“Swallowing — impossible in coma… Toxemia?”

“Lesion.”

A younger doctor weighed in, short on experience, long on science. “The patient’s head is not turned. His eyes are not deflected to either side. If there was a lesion, the patient would look toward it. There is no lesion.”

“Then what?”

“Asphyxia.”

The moon hovered inside a silver halo. Full and perfectly round.

It was beautiful and distant, and then it slipped away.

The dark came back. It settled in heavily again, deep as winter.

27

Antonio Branco’s fast freight to eastern Pennsylvania was sidelined to let the Lackawanna Railroad’s “Phoebe Snow” passenger sleeper overtake. He jumped off the flatcar and climbed under it. Before the Phoebe Snow highballed past, he had found a safer and slightly warmer place on the rods.

He stuck with the train until the Bethlehem Junction yards, where he dodged a yard bull and climbed under a freight to Wilkes-Barre. At Wilkes-Barre, he caught a train to Scranton, riding on the roof, when he saw brakemen checking the rods. He clung to a ventilator and kept a close eye on the tracks ahead of the locomotive so he wouldn’t be lurched off by a sharp curve, jumped when it slowed approaching the yards, found a barn a mile from the tracks, and slept in the hayloft. After dark, he climbed under a Delaware & Hudson coal train that turned slowly northeastward through Carbondale to Cadosia, where the coal hoppers were switched to the southeastwardly bearing New York, Ontario & Western Railway. He rode them at a glacial pace, night and day and night again, through Summitville, Middletown, and Maybrook.

After Meadowbrook, he smelled tidewater.

The first gray light of dawn revealed that the tracks squeezed between steep hills and the Hudson River, deep in mist. Estates appeared on the hillsides, Gothic, Greek Revival, and old American-style mansions set far apart on lawns as big as farms. An enormous summer tourist hotel loomed up unexpectedly, then a three-story icehouse with a wharf to barge the ice harvest to New York, then white boardinghouses, and, quite suddenly, redbrick factories.

He heard the locomotive back off and felt the heavy cars butt couplers. When he glimpsed a huge jetty surrounded by steamers, he flexed his stiff knee to get ready to run. The train slowed for its final stop, the Cornwall Landing coal docks at the foot of Storm King Mountain.

Filthy, hungry, and frozen to the bone, Antonio Branco had traveled five hundred miles in a circle that landed him — without a trace of where he had come from — just fifty miles north of where he had ditched the Van Dorns in Jersey City. No one knew he was there. No one knew where he came from — just another Italian pick and shovel man begging to work on the Catskill Aqueduct for a dollar seventy-five cents a day.

As the coal train entered the yards, the morning sun cleared a hill on the far side of the river and cast yellow light on a huge estate house that reminded Branco of Greek ruins in Sicily. He recognized John Butler Culp’s famous Raven’s Eyrie. He had seen it often from the Hudson River steamboats — long before he learned that Culp was his man.

But what riveted his attention was the sight of Culp’s private train. It was waiting in the Cornwall Landing rail yards — splendid red coaches drawn by an ink-black Atlantic 4-4-2.

The locomotive had steam up.

Culp could leave at a moment’s notice.

Branco had no time to lose.

He jumped from the rods before the train stopped rolling and ran to the aqueduct siphon shaft excavation, which he pinpointed by the sight of Negro men driving mule wagons across raw ground, and a vast cluster of locomotives, wagons, and steam shovels, emblazoned with the names of Irish contractors.

His immigrant laborer disguise worked perfectly. Moments after he was issued a pay number on a brass token, he was approached by a “key”—a Black Hand extortionist who pretended to be a terrified fellow laborer.

“Did you hear?” the key whispered. “The Black Hand says each man has to give a dollar on payday. They kill us if we don’t pay up.”

“Take me to your boss.”

“What boss?”

Branco fixed him with a cold stare. “When your boss learns that you didn’t take me to him, he will kill you.”

Vito Rizzo, the Black Hand gangster dealt a broken nose and a ragged ear by the Van Dorns, had been told at “confession” to establish a labor extortion racket at Cornwall Landing and await orders. He operated out of a board-on-barrels saloon down the road from the siphon shaft.

When his gorillas marched a soot-blackened pick and shovel man into his back room, he addressed the laborer with utter contempt, failing to recognize a richly clad Little Italy prominente he had seen occasionally from a distance.

Antonio Branco handed him a brass token. It looked exactly like the payment number identification check he had been issued at the gate.

“Turn it over.”

A simple asterisk had been punched into the metal.

Rizzo jumped to his feet. “Get out of here,” he shouted at his gorillas. “All of ya.” He slammed the door behind them. Then he tugged off his hat and stared at his boots, making a point of not looking at Branco’s face — demonstrating that he could never identify this man who held over him the power of life and death.

He spoke humbly, and he made no effort to hide his fear.

“May I please help you, Dominatore?”

“I need a place to clean up and eat while you get me fresh clothes, a length of bell cord, a blasting cap, and a stick of dynamite.”

The moon hovered inside a silver halo.

Full and perfectly round.

The dark returned.

The doctors had never met anyone like the extraordinarily beautiful young woman, dressed in traveling tweeds and wearied by days on the train. She fixed them with a sharp, clear-eyed gaze that brooked no equivocation and no platitudes. Each found himself struggling to answer as straightforwardly as their professors had demanded at medical school.

“We are reasonably certain he suffered no lacerations of the brain. There are no indications of even slight capillary hemorrhage.”

“Nor lesions in either hemisphere.”

“The only marks on his head were old scars, long healed. There are no wounds to his torso or his limbs. It was quite miraculous — almost as if a giant hand had closed around him when the building caved in.”

She said, “But still he sleeps.”

“It is possible this confirms a diagnosis that his stupor, or coma, resulted from asphyxia caused by inhalation of poisonous gas.”

“When will he awaken?”

“We don’t know.”

“Will he awaken?”

“Well… there is hope in that he was a strong man.”

She rounded on them, fiercely. “He is a strong man.”

28

In the immortal words of Brewster Claypool: Money is made when the smart money acts on their smart ideas — bless their smart little hearts.

Dead only five days, and already Culp missed him.

The conductor called, “Engineer’s ready when you are, sir.”

“One more,” said Culp.

His man from eastern Pennsylvania was pacing the private train platform. Culp lowered his window. “Send in that bloody lawyer.”

In came the bloody lawyer. He was one of a bunch that had reported to Claypool — sparing Culp the tedium — and he was everything that Culp’s old “partner in crime” had not been: colorless, humorless, and duller than dishwater.

“The Department of Justice is widening the investigation of the Ramapo Water Company.”

Culp’s face darkened. The Ramapo Grab — a dodge he and Claypool had cooked up to take over New York’s water supply — would have milked the city of $5,000,000 a year every year for forty years.

“I thought you had spent a lot of my money encouraging them not to investigate.”

“It would appear that the Progressives want to make an example.”

“Why not make an example of J. P. Morgan? He stuck his big nose in the ship canal limelight. Why don’t they shine it on him?”

The Washington lawyer answered blandly. “I’m afraid, sir, we must accept that it is what it is.”

Lawyers loved that line of talk. “It is what it is” shifted the blame for their incompetence to the client.

“Roosevelt is behind this.”

“It is President Roosevelt’s Justice Department. In fact, sir, I would be remiss not to warn you that the impulse to prosecute appears to come straight from the White House.”

“But why me, dammit? Why not Morgan’s canal?”

Brewster Claypool would have mimicked Roosevelt fulminating in a high-pitched falsetto: “Ramapo would levy a two-hundred-million-dollar rich-man tax against the parched citizens of the nation’s greatest city.”

Bloody, bloody hell!

“Did you say something, sir?”

This was much worse than Culp had feared. “I’m leaving Scranton,” he said.

“Shall I ride back to New York with you, Mr. Culp? I can catch a Washington express from there.”

Culp’s conductor rousted the lawyer off his train.

His engineer blew the ahead signal.

His locomotive steamed from the private platform, maneuvered out of the yards onto a cleared track, and began to labor up the steep grade into the Pocono Mountains. Culp got to work, dictating mental notes into a graphophone. Suddenly, the front vestibule door flew open, admitting the full thunder of the straining locomotive. He looked up. As swarthy a complexioned Italian as ever had sneaked past immigration officials pushed into his car.

29

“Where the devil did you come from?”

Culp did not wait for the intruder to answer but instead grabbed his pistol from his desk drawer and leveled it at the swarthy man’s head. The only reason not to put a bullet through it was that he might be a stupid track worker who had been somehow swept along when the train left Scranton, in which case sorting it out with the local authorities would end any hope of getting to the Cherry Grove in time for a late supper. But he wasn’t a track worker; he was wearing a rucksack like a hobo.

“Do you understand English?” he roared. “Who the hell are you?”

The man did speak English, in a rolling manner that reminded Culp of Claypool at his most convoluted.

“I am a stranger with an irresistible offer to become well known to you.”

“That’ll be the day. Raise your hands.”

The man raised his hands. Culp saw that he was holding a length of cord that stretched behind him and out the vestibule door. “What’s that string?”

“The trigger.”

“What? Trigger? What trigger?”

“To trigger the detonator.”

“Deton—”

“I should lower my hand,” the intruder interrupted. “I’m stretching the slack. If the train lurches, I might tug it by mistake. If that were to happen, a stick of dynamite would blow up the coupler that holds your private car to your private locomotive.”

“Are you a lunatic? We’ll roll back down into Scranton and both die.”

“Chissà,” said the man.

“Kiss-a? What the blazes is kiss-a dago for?”

“Chissà means ‘who knows’ if I live or die? Or should I say we.”

Culp cocked the .45. “You’re dead anyhow, no ‘kiss-a’ about it.”

“If you shoot me, you will die, too.”

“No greasy immigrant is dictating to me.”

Antonio Branco looked calmly down the gun barrel. “I am impressed, Mr. Culp. I was told that you are more interesting than a coddled child of the rich. Strong as stone.”

“Who told you that?”

“Brewster Claypool.”

“What? When?”

“When he died.”

Culp turned red with rage. He stood up and extended the pistol with a hand that shook convulsively. “You’re the one who killed Claypool.”

“No, I did not kill him. I tried to save him.”

“What are you talking about?”

“A fool I brought to help me acted like a fool.”

“You were there. You killed him.”

“No, I wanted him alive as much as you. I needed Claypool. He would be my go-between. Now I have no choice but to entreat you face-to-face. I’ve lost everything. My business ruined. My reputation. The Van Dorns are after me. And now, without Claypool to represent me, I stand alone with your pistol in my face.”

“You killed Claypool.”

“No, I did not kill him,” Branco repeated. “He was my only hope.”

“I don’t understand… Lower your hands!”

Branco lowered his hands but stepped forward so the cord stayed taut. “Don’t you know who I am?”

“I don’t care who you are.”

“The gas explosion.”

“What gas explosion?”

“On Prince Street. It destroyed tenements. You must have read it in the paper.”

“Why would I read about explosions in Italian colony tenements?”

“To know what happened to Isaac Bell.”

The man had caught him flat-footed.

J. B. Culp could not hide his surprise. “Bell? Is that what put Bell in the hospital? What is Bell’s condition?”

“Tu sogni accarezzévole.”

“What’s that dago for?”

“Sweet dreams.”

Culp laughed. “O.K. So you lost everything. What do you want from me? Money?”

“I have plenty of money.” Still holding the string, he shrugged the rucksack off his shoulder and lobbed it onto Culp’s desk. “Look inside.”

Culp unbuckled the flap. The canvas bulged with banded stacks of fifty- and hundred-dollar notes. “Looks like you robbed a bank.”

“I lost only my ‘public’ business. I have my private business.”

“What’s your private business?”

“Mano Nero.”

“Black Hand?… In other words, you used to hide your gangster business behind a legitimate business and now you are nothing but a gangster.”

“I am much more than a gangster.”

“How do you reckon that?”

“I am a gangster with a friend in high places.”

“Not me, sport.” Culp tossed the rucksack at the man’s feet. “Get off my train.”

“A friend so high that he is higher than the President.”

Culp had been enjoying crossing swords with the intruder, despite the very real threat of a dynamited coupler. But the conversation had taken a vicious twist. The man was acting as if he had him over a worse barrel than crashing down the mountain at eighty miles per hour.

“Where,” he asked, “did you get that idea?”

“Claypool offered me the job.”

“I don’t know what you are talking about. What job?”

“Killing Roosevelt.”

“Are you crazy? Claypool would never say such a thing.”

“He had no choice,” the gangster answered coldly.

30

The moon hovered inside a silver halo. Full and perfectly round.

It was beautiful and distant.

Cold rain sprinkled his lips, then a silken brush of warmth.

Suddenly, the sun filled the sky. It had a halo like the moon, but its halo was golden.

Isaac Bell opened his eyes. The sun was smiling inches from his face. His heart swelled, and he whispered, “Hello, Marion, weren’t you in San Francisco?”

Marion Morgan blinked tears away. “I cannot believe you are actually smiling.”

“I always smile at beautiful women.”

Bell looked around, gradually aware that he was in a bed that smelled of strong soap. A kaleidoscope was whirling in slow motion. Through it, he saw grave doctors, in modern white coats, and a nurse, glowering at Marion, the only non-medico in the room. He said, “Something tells me we won’t be enjoying the night in a hotel.”

“Probably not tonight.”

“We’ll see about that.” Bell moved his hands and feet, and stretched his arms and legs, and turned his head to face the doctors. “As far as I can feel, my brain is in working order, and I still have the same number of limbs I was originally issued. Can you tell me why I’m in your hospital?”

“This is the first you’ve sat up and spoken in eight days.”

Bell felt the room shift a little bit, as if the bed was set on a creaky turntable. “I’d been feeling the need for a rest. Looks like I got it.”

“Do you remember anything that happened before you lost consciousness? Any detail, no matter how small? Any—”

“The floor sank under me and the roof caved in.”

“Do you remember why?”

“Are the boys O.K.?”

“Your squad dug you out.”

Bell looked at Marion. She nodded. “They’re all O.K.”

The doctor said, “Do you remember why it happened?”

“Because Antonio Branco pulled another fast one — about the fastest fast one I’ve ever run into.” He turned to Marion. “Did the boys catch him?”

“He got away from Detective Edwards last week in the Jersey City yards.”

“A week? He could steal rides anywhere in the country in a week.”

“Or charter a special,” said Marion. “Detective Edwards told me Branco swindled a banker and a wine broker out of fifty thousand before he left.”

The bed shifted again. Bell had a feeling it would do this for a while, in fits and starts. The doctors were staring at him like a monkey in a bell jar.

“Events,” Bell told them, “are coming back in a rush. I want you to move me to a quiet, semi-dark room where I can talk them out with my fiancée, Miss Morgan.”

Marion leaned closer and whispered in his ear. “Are you really all right?”

Bell whispered back, “See if you can get them to send up a cold bird and a bottle of bubbly… Wait!”

“What is it, Isaac?”

“I just realized… Marion, get me out of here! Wire Joe Van Dorn. I don’t care if he has to spring me at gunpoint… I just realized, Branco wouldn’t have shoved a knife in Claypool’s chest if Claypool hadn’t already admitted his boss was Culp.”

Snow pelted the glass at Raven’s Eyrie, where Antonio Branco luxuriated under a fur counterpane in a princely guest room attached to the gymnasium. It was far from the main house. Culp’s wife had moved to their New York mansion for the winter season. The servants who had brought him supper the night they returned from Scranton, and breakfast the morning after, were a pair of bruised and battered prizefighters. Culp said they could be trusted.

“Mr. Culp is waiting for you in the trophy room,” one of them told him after breakfast.

A nailhead-studded, Gothic-arched, medieval fortress door guarded the trophy room, which was as big as a barn — two stories high and windowless — and lighted by electric chandeliers. Mounted heads of elk, moose, and bison loomed from the walls. Life-size elephant, rhino, Cape buffalo, and a nine-foot grizzly bear crowded the floor. Tiger skins lay as carpet. Doors and alcoves were framed with ivory tusks.

J. B. Culp stood at a giant rosewood desk that was flanked by suits of medieval armor. Mounted on the wall behind him were hunting rifles and sidearms. He indicated a large, comfortable-looking leather armchair that faced his desk. Antonio Branco stayed on his feet.

“Sleep well?”

“I thank you for your hospitality.”

“You didn’t give me any choice.”

“A dead president can’t prosecute you.”

“So you said on my train.”

Branco said, “And the private aqueduct will be yours.”

“The pot sweetener,” Culp said sarcastically. But he was, in fact, deeply intrigued. The blackmailing Italian had a doozy of a scheme to take control of the Catskill Aqueduct — dams, reservoirs, tunnels, and all — that just might work. A second shot at the Ramapo Grab.

“You’ve had the night to think about your opportunity,” said Branco. “What is your answer?”

“The same,” Culp said coldly. “No one dictates terms to me.”

“You can continue your wonderful life,” said Branco. “And I can make it even more wonderful for you. The aqueduct will be only the beginning. I will help you in all your businesses.”

Culp said, “You can count on the fingers of one hand the men in this country richer than I am, and none are as young. I don’t need your help.”

Branco said, “I will eliminate labor problems. I will eliminate your rivals. I will eliminate your enemies. They will disappear as if you wave a fairy’s wand. A coal strike in Colorado? Sabotage in Pittsburgh? Reformers in San Francisco? Radicals in Los Angeles? Anywhere you are plagued in the nation, I will un-plague you.”

“Just out of curiosity, what will all this ‘un-plaguing’ cost me?”

“Half.”

Culp pretended to consider it. “Half of everything you help me make? Not bad.”

“Half of everything.”

“Everything? Listen to me, you greasy little dago. I don’t need you to get things I already own.”

“You need me to continue enjoying the things you own.”

Culp’s face darkened. “You’re offering to be partners and you are blackmailing me.”

“You are correct.”

Culp laughed.

“You laugh at me?” said Branco. “Why? In this arrangement, I take all the risks. The police can’t walk into your mansion with guns blazing. They’ll shoot the ‘greasy dago.’ They will never shoot Mr. John Butler Culp.”

“I’m laughing at your nerve.”

Branco stared at the man lounging behind his desk. Was Culp so insulated, so isolated from the world, that he was ignorant of the danger, the threat, Branco posed? A strange thought struck him: Or was Culp a man above ordinary men?

“Wouldn’t you do exactly the same if our positions were turned upside down?”

“I sure as hell would,” said Culp. “Exactly the same.”

“Malvivente.”

“What’s that dago for?”

“Gangster.”

J. B. Culp beamed. He suddenly felt as free as a hoodlum stepping out on Saturday night, with brilliantined hair, a dime cigar, and a pistol in his pocket. Anything could happen. He thrust out his hand.

“O.K., partner. Shake on it.”

Branco said, “I would very much like to shake your hand. But I can’t.”

“Why not? I thought you wanted a partner.”

“You put us at risk.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Your prizefighters know too much.”

Culp raised his voice. “Lee! Barry! Get in here.”

They entered quickly. Too quickly.

“Were you listening at the door?”

They exchanged looks. Barry tried to bull through it. “Sure we was listening. You’re alone in here with this guy. We gotta make sure you’re O.K.”

John Butler Culp reached back and took a Colt Bisley .32–20 target pistol from the wall of guns. He fired once at Barry. The heavyweight sagged to the floor with a hole the diameter of a cigarette between his eyes.

Lee gaped in disbelief.

Culp fired again.

Then he said to Branco, “Get rid of the bodies, partner.”

31

Skeletons were scattered like pick-up sticks. The half of the graveyard nearest the church was still a timeless patch of headstones poking out of green grass, but the explosion had churned the rest into muddy earth and jumbled bones. Above it rose a mountain of bricks and timbers, all that remained of three five-story tenement buildings and Antonio Branco’s grocery warehouse.

Isaac Bell surveyed the destruction from a roof across Prince Street. The Mayor had put the Health Department in charge of removing rubble to search for bodies. Scores of city workers were digging, shifting, and loading their finds into wagons.

“How,” Bell asked, “did the gas penetrate three entire buildings before it exploded?”

The tall detective was flanked by explosives expert Wally Kisley and Gang Squad chief Harry Warren. They hovered at his elbows, braced to grab hold if he fell over. Bell shrugged them off and took a long, hard look.

Branco’s Grocery had occupied two lots, fifty feet of street frontage. Three side-by-side tenements, each twenty-five feet wide, measured another seventy-five feet. The explosion had leveled one hundred twenty-five feet of buildings and fifty feet of graveyard. As Kisley had put it when Bell walked out the hospital’s back door, “One hell of a bang.”

Now, looking down from the rooftop, Kisley did not sound entirely comfortable with his explanation about the scale of destruction. “Thing is, Isaac, they build tenements in rows, several at a time. The walls are made of brick, but they leave man passages so the workmen can move easily between them. When they’re done building, they fill the holes with scrap material and lightly plaster them over. Not much to stop gas from seeping through.”

“How did Branco set it off and escape with his life?”

“Could have left a timing device to spark it off. Could have laid a fuse.”

Bell turned to Harry Warren. “I want you to investigate where and how Branco’s legitimate businesses connected to the underworld.”

“I’ve been looking at that ever since you first brought it up,” said Warren. “I still can’t find a single complaint about fraud or extortion. Branco ran his grocery business clean as a whistle.”

Kisley interrupted. “It’s like he was two entirely different people: a crook, and a choirboy.”

“Then why didn’t the crooked outfits attack him?”

“Only one thing would stop them,” said Warren.

“Fear,” said Bell.

Warren nodded emphatically. “Somehow, lowlifes knew better than to mess about with Branco.”

“But if no one ever saw him with crooks, how did he give orders? He controlled gangs: Black Hand gorillas, drug smugglers, and counterfeiters. For that matter, how does he command them now while he’s on the run?”

“I don’t know, Isaac.”

Another question puzzled Bell.

“Why did he blow up the building?”

“He ambushed us.”

“No. He could not know precisely the moment we were going to break down his door. He just got lucky with us charging in, just like we got lucky not getting killed… And if you guys don’t let go of my elbows I’ll break your arms! I’m fine… Why did he blow it up?”

“To hide evidence.”

“What evidence? I already had him dead to rights at the Singer Building. He planned this ahead of time. He was ready to run when he had to.”

Bell traced, again, the long line of destruction, the mound of rubble that had been Branco’s store, to the taller heap of the tenements, down to the graveyard, and past the uprooted bones. The church itself was unscathed. Even its stained glass windows were intact. He still thought it remarkable how far the gas traveled.

“I want to know who owned those tenements… Keep greasing Health Department palms. Slip some of our boys onto their pick and shovel crews. Get a close look at everything they dig out. And call me the instant I can inspect what’s left of Branco’s cellar.”

“Enrico,” said Isaac Bell when he lured Caruso to the Knickerbocker’s cellar bar for a glass of champagne, “you’re Italian.”

“Guilty,” smiled the opera singer. “But, first, I am Neopolitan.”

“Let me ask you something. What drives a Sicilian?”

“A hundred invasions. Countless tyrants. They’ve triumphed by their wits for three thousand years. Why do you ask?”

“I’m reckoning how Antonio Branco thinks.”

“Sicilians think for themselves—only themselves.”

“When I asked Tetrazzini on our way to San Francisco, she called them ‘bumpkins from down south.’ Primitive peasants.”

“Never!” Caruso roared, laughing. “Tetrazzini’s from Florence, she can’t help herself. Sicilians are the direct opposite of primitive. They are sophisticated. Strategic. Clear of eye, and unabashedly extravagant. They see, they understand, they act — all in a heartbeat. In other words—”

“Never underestimate them,” said Bell.

“There isn’t a law written they don’t despise.”

“Good,” said Bell. “Thank you.”

“‘Good’?”

“Now I know what he’ll try next.”

“What?” asked Caruso.

“Some unsuspecting bigwig is about to get a Black Hand letter. And it will be a Black Hand letter to end all Black Hand letters.”

Archie hurried into the bar. Peering through the gloom of Caruso’s cigarette smoke, he spotted Bell, and whispered urgently, “Research says Branco owns the shell company that controls the shell company that owns the tenements next door to his grocery.”

32

The Health Department laborers excavating the Branco’s Grocery wreckage went home at night, leaving only a watchman in charge now that the bodies of all the missing had been removed. Wally Kisley and Harry Warren bribed him. They stood guard at the burned-out stairs that had descended from Branco’s kitchen to the cellar.

Isaac Bell climbed down a ladder with an up-to-date tungsten filament flashlight powered by improved long-lasting, carbon-zinc dry cell batteries. He played its beam over a tangle of charred timbers and broken masonry and was surprised to discover a back section had somehow withstood the collapse of the building’s upper tier.

The flashlight revealed the walls of a room that was still intact. It was a remarkable sight in the otherwise chaotic ruin. The mystery was solved when Bell saw a square of vertical iron bars that had supported the ceiling. The bars formed what looked like a prison cell. Then he saw a hinged door and lock and realized that it was indeed a jail cell or holding pen. Installed by labor padrone Branco to enforce contracts? Or by gangster Branco to show rivals who was boss?

He found another open space of about the same dimensions beyond a mound of debris. It had no bars, but the walls were solid steel, and the door, which was open, was massive, a full eight inches thick. A walk-in safe.

Bell stepped inside.

The cash boxes were empty. He saw no ash in them; the money hadn’t burned but had left in Branco’s pockets. Bell thought it curious that the gangster had fled well-heeled yet risked arrest by taking the time to defraud banker LaCava and the wine broker. A reminder that Branco was the coolest of customers.

The safe’s walls were pockmarked. Twisted metal and charred wood littered the floor. Exploding ammunition had destroyed Branco’s cache of shotguns and revolvers. Those explosions, or the original gas explosion, had buckled and shifted the back wall of the safe. It hung at a drunken angle, and when Bell looked closely, he saw another set of hinges. A door — an odd thing to find in what should be an impregnable wall.

His light began to fade. “New and improved” aside, it was still only a flashlight and couldn’t last for long. He switched it off, to conserve the D cells, and felt the hinges with his hands. There was definitely a door at the back of the safe.

Bell gripped the edge with both hands and pulled it inward. Then he switched the light on again and peered behind it. All he could see was thickly packed debris, brick, wood, and plaster. Just as he doused the flashlight again to conserve the last of its power, he glimpsed a roughhewn stone wall rimming both sides of the door and he realized he was looking into what had been an entrance cut into the basement of the tenement building behind Antonio Branco’s grocery.

“Now we know,” Isaac Bell told Kisley and Warren, who were waiting at the top of the ladder, “how the gas traveled so far before it exploded. And also why Branco blew it up. It hid some kind of underground passage that ran from his place, beneath those tenements, and into the graveyard.”

“What’s in the graveyard?”

“Give the watchman more money and borrow three shovels.”

The Van Dorns picked their way across the fallen tenements, following narrow, twisting corridors burrowed by the Health Department, and emerged through a final shattered foundation. The graveyard was lit dimly by a few tenement kitchens that overlooked it and a stained glass clerestory at the back of the church.

Bell led the way over the rough earth that the explosion had plowed. The bones he had seen from the Prince Street roof had been gathered into an orderly row of coffins. The odor of fresh-sawn pine boards mingled with the pungent soil. The church and the surrounding tenements blocked street noise, and it was so quiet he could hear the whir of sewing machines in the apartments overhead.

Where the plowed ground met the grass, he said, “We’ll start here.”

Two feet down, their shovels rang on brick.

They moved back, off the grass, onto the raw earth, and dug some more.

“My shovel hit air!” said Wally Kisley. An instant later, he yelped out loud and disappeared. The ground had opened up. Bell leaped into the hole after him and landed on top of him in the dark.

“You O.K., Wally?” The explosives expert was getting too old for tumbling.

“Tip-top, when you get off me.”

Harry Warren landed beside them. “What have we here?”

Bell switched on his flashlight. “It’s another tunnel.”

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

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

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

Bell mounted the steps.

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

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

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

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

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

Isaac Bell drew his gun.

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

Bell pressed his handkerchief to his lips.

“Talk American,” he muttered.

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

“Go on.”

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

“You,” said Bell.

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

“What?” said Bell.

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

“You tell me.”

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

“What if he is?” asked Bell.

“I don’t know.”

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

“Did you do what I told you last?”

“Yes.”

“Tell me what you did.”

“I did what you said.”

“Tell me exactly what you did.”

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

“What sign?”

“The sign you said to look for.”

“Which?”

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

“Did he come?”

“Yeah. I did everything he told me.”

“Where is he now?”

“I don’t know.”

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

“No you didn’t.”

Bell let a silence build. Rizzo broke it.

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

“What did he want?”

“Clothes, food, stick of dynamite.”

“You must know where he went.”

“I don’t know.”

“When did he come?”

“Four days ago.”

“And you haven’t seen him since?”

“No. He left.”

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

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

“What do you want me to do, Boss?”

“I want you to raise your hands.”

“What?”

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

“What?”

“Raise your hands.”

“What did you say?”

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

“Who are you?”

“Bell. Van Dorn Agency.”

The Black Hand gangster shouted a string of curses.

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

“Such language in church!”

33

“I hope you weren’t seeking privacy, Mr. Bell, but there isn’t a restaurant man in New York who would seat such a beautiful woman out of sight.”

Rector’s, the big, bright, loud Broadway lobster palace, was just around the corner from the Knickerbocker Hotel. The proprietor, an old friend of Joseph Van Dorn’s from Chicago, had seated Marion Morgan at a highly visible banquet table ordinarily reserved for Broadway actresses.

Bell said, “Convey my apologies to any patrons whose view I block… We’ll start with champagne. Billecart-Salmon Brut Rosé.”

“I suspected as much, Mr. Bell. It’s on its way to the table.”

Bell and bottle arrived simultaneously.

“Billecart-Salmon Brut Rosé?” said Marion. “What are you celebrating?”

“Dinner with the prettiest girl in New York. And the news that we nailed one of Branco’s top lieutenants.”

“Congratulations.”

He took his seat opposite. “Marion, I’ve never seen you lovelier.”

“Thank you, Isaac.”

Bell heard an uncharacteristic constraint in her voice. “You sound anxious. Shall I have us moved to a less noticeable table?”

“If I didn’t want to be noticed, I would not have bought a dress of cobalt blue.”

“Something is troubling you.”

She returned a tight smile. “You know me so well, don’t you?”

“If you’re worried about me, don’t be. My memory’s tip-top; I’m completely over the stupor, or coma, or whatever the devil the medicos call several solid nights’ sleep.”

Marion passed an envelope across the table. “I thought I should let you open this.”

Bell recognized the stationery even before he read the address.

Flushed with fury, Bell plunged his hand into his boot.

“People,” Marion warned with a significant glance at the full restaurant. She passed him an oyster fork, and with a grateful nod Bell used its wide tine to slit the envelope.

The silhouettes of a black hand, a revolver, and a skull pierced by a dagger were drawn with exceptional skill, the work of an artist. The wording of the threat was densely baroque, the threat itself, grotesque.

Fully aware that “Dearest Signora” and “in your feminine power” and “beautiful lady” were phrases deliberately calculated to set him off half cocked, Isaac Bell still had to fight hard to douse his rage. The intent of Antonio Branco’s poisonous message was the same as a threat to bomb a Little Italy pushcart — sow panic. At least, thought Bell, it was exactly what he had predicted: a Black Hand letter to rival all Black Hand letters.

Did it mean that President Roosevelt was in the clear? Was the assassination plot that Brewster Claypool had set in motion for J. B. Culp no longer active? Just the opposite. Antonio Branco had landed on his feet. All four feet, as the saying went.

“Why are you smiling?” asked Marion.

“Am I?”

“Like a timber wolf. Why?”

“Only in America.”

“What do you mean?”

“An immigrant gangster shakes hands with a blue-blood tycoon.”

“Antonio Branco and J. B. Culp?”

Bell tossed the letter on the tablecloth. “This pretty much confirms what Vito Rizzo ‘confessed.’ The man he helped at Storm King was Branco himself. He’s probably in Culp’s mansion by now, warming his feet on the hearth.”

“Why would a man as rich and powerful as Culp shelter a criminal?”

“Each offers what the other wants. Branco wants power. Culp wants the President dead.”

Marion picked up the letter and read it.

“What is this about?” she asked, and quoted: “‘The City cannot protect the aqueduct.’”

“Branco is reminding us that it is nearly impossible to guard anything a hundred miles long.”

“What about this? ‘Water Supply Board helpless’?”

“Same thing… Except, funny you ask… Grady in Research said that initially there was a huge battle in New York whether to make the aqueduct a City-operated public project or a privately owned enterprise that charged the City for the water. The City won, but it was close-fought. You can bet the losers hate the Water Supply Board.”

“Was Culp the loser?”

“It was fought by proxies. Shell companies. Could have been. Who knows?”

“I wonder why Branco wants the money delivered at the Storm King Shaft. Where is that?”

“Fifty miles up the river at Cornwall Landing.”

“Do you suppose that the ‘powers that are’ received their own letters like this?”

“I’m sure the Water Supply Board and the Mayor both got them. Ours was probably an afterthought to get my goat.”

“Will they pay?”

“Not if I can help it.”

“But Branco dynamited Giuseppe Vella’s church job, and he bombed Banco LaCava. If he follows his pattern, he will attack.”

“The only question is where,” Bell agreed.

Marion said, “Storm King Shaft.”

“How do you reckon that?”

“An explosion or sabotage anywhere else could be deemed an accident. But a bomb at the same place he names in the letter would leave no doubt that he means business.”

Bell looked at his fiancée with deeper admiration than ever. “You’d be a crackersjack extortionist.”

“It has the ring of truth, doesn’t it?”

“It does indeed.”

Bell signaled a waiter.

“Pack up our dinner in a picnic basket. And ask Mr. Rector if he would use his influence to book us a last-minute state room on the night boat to Storm King.”

Marion put on her gloves and picked up her bag. “Isn’t there a Van Dorn Detective rule against bringing friends to gunfights?”

“This infernal letter makes you a candidate for round-the-clock Van Dorn protection — I guarantee no gunfights in our state room.”

“How about fireworks?”

Drill heads battered the rock a thousand feet under the Hudson River. Boring into the circular heading, they scattered a pink powder of pulverized granite. Water seeping from minute seams in the vaulted ceiling turned the powder to a sticky grime that caked helmets, slickers, boots, and faces.

Isaac Bell, introduced by the siphon contractor as a newly hired foreman learning the ropes, was no stranger to digging underground, having masqueraded as a coal miner on the Striker case. Granite, however, was a lot harder than coal; the fourteen-foot-high pressure tunnel was of palatial dimensions compared to a mine shaft; and granite grime, unlike black coal dust, colored the hard-rock gang working the 8 p.m. to 4 a.m. shift as pink as marzipan pigs.

Bell had a Van Dorn detective operating the shaft hoist cage and picked men stationed around the shaft house. They were backed up by the contractor’s own guards, while Water Supply Board Police roamed the perimeter. Archie Abbott had sped up on a morning train to escort Marion safely back to the Knickerbocker; Helen Mills was standing by with a newly issued sidearm that Bell knew the general’s daughter was extremely capable of using; nor did he doubt that if the Black Hand tried anything, they would never run up against a more levelheaded duo in New York.

Marion Morgan and Archie Abbott’s train to New York City hugged the riverbank at West Point. Rendered pewter by an overcast sky, the Hudson looked as cold as the stone fortifications. The sky threatened snow, and ice was hardening on still water in coves and creeks. Marion was thinking she had better buy a warm winter coat when Archie suddenly spoke up.

“I met a widow.”

“How old a widow?”

“Twenty-two… She married young.”

“Do you like her?”

“I’m besotted.”

“That’s a dangerous condition, Archie.”

“Call it infatuated.”

Marion laughed. “That’s worse.”

Archie looked at her, quite seriously. “It’s never happened to me before.”

Though younger than Archie, Marion felt that he was opening up to her like a big sister and she answered bluntly, “Besotted and infatuated imply a strong dose of foolishness.”

“I know that.”

“What’s her name?”

“Francesca.”

“Beautiful name.”

“It fits her. She is intoxicatingly beautiful.”

“Besotting, infatuating, and intoxicating? Francesca better look out for the Anti-Saloon League.”

“She doesn’t drink. Won’t touch a drop. I’ve become a teetotaler around her.” He grinned. “Drunk on love, instead.”

Marion said, “Speaking from my own experience of meeting Isaac, I can only say one word: Congratulations! I look forward to meeting Francesca.”

“Oh, you’ll love her. She’s really interesting. She can talk a blue streak about anything.”

Helen Mills met them at the Jersey City Terminal. On the ferry, she explained that Mr. Van Dorn had arranged for the Knickerbocker to move Marion into a suite with two bedrooms, the second for Helen.

“I hope you don’t mind a roommate.”

“It will be like being back at school.”

Archie escorted them to the hotel and rushed off to see Francesca.

At the end of the long shift, the hard-rock gang packed their round of bore holes with dynamite. They moved the short distance to the shaft, took cover, and shot the explosives with electric detonators. With a muffled rumble, the granite they had drilled all day was blown from the face and the siphon tunnel was put through another couple of yards. They boarded the shaft hoist cage for a lift to the surface, too tired, as one man put it, “even for drinking.”

Isaac Bell stayed below to watch the mucking crew.

Before the smoke had cleared, the muckers raced with picks and shovels to the heading and started loading the dynamited rock into cars hauled by an electric locomotive. All but their hard-driving Irish foreman were Italian laborers. Any one of them could be Antonio Branco’s saboteur. Or each could be exactly what he looked like: a hardworking immigrant shoveling his guts out for a dollar seventy-five a day.

The muckers were just finishing clearing rock when water suddenly gushed into the heading. A water-bearing seam had opened, disturbed, perhaps, by the last shift’s blast.

“Il fiume!” cried a laborer.

The others laughed, and the Irishman explained to Bell. “Ignorant wop thinks the river’s busting through the roof.”

“Why are they laughing at him?”

“They’re not as dumb as him. They know there’s nine hundred feet of shale and a hundred feet of solid granite between the roof and the river. It ain’t river water. It’s just water that was in the rocks. How much you think it’s running? Hundred gallons a minute?”

He gave Bell the broad wink of a know-it-all barfly. “Feller told me the company knew they’d hit water along this stretch, but kept it quiet. If you get my meaning…”

“I’m afraid I don’t,” said Bell. “I’m new here. If they knew they were going to hit water, why did they keep it quiet?”

“The way it works; they bid low to get the job, but they’ll make it back with extras. They gotta grout the water-bearing seams. And that don’t come cheap. Before they grout, they’ll need more pumps, and pipes to divert the water. Might even have to build a reinforced concrete bulkhead to fill the entire heading to keep from flooding.”

“You mean they get their cake and eat it, too.”

“That’s what the feller told me. Smart man…” The foreman’s voice trailed off, and he frowned. The water was running harder. Some of the other muckers who had laughed at the Nervous Nellie moments ago were looking anxious.

“Calm down, you dumb guineas. Calm down. Back to work. Calm down. No worry.”

But the laborers continued casting anxious looks at the face of the heading, where the seam gushed, and at water rising over the muck car tracks.

“Il fiume!”

Others repeated the cry. “Il fiume!”

“There’s no ‘fu-may,’ dammit,” yelled the foreman. “It’s just rock water.”

A laborer, who was older than the others, pointed with a trembling finger at the cleft in the stone where the water gushed.

“Mano Nero.”

“Black Hand?” The foreman seized a young laborer he used as a translator. “What the hell’s he talking about?”

“Mano Nero. Sabotage.”

“That’s nuts! Tell them it’s nuts.”

The translator tried, but they shouted him down. “They say someone didn’t pay.”

“Pay what?” asked Isaac Bell. It sounded like word of the Black Hand letter had trickled down to the workmen.

“The dollars we’re supposed to give from our pay,” said the translator.

“It’s a Black Hand shakedown,” said the foreman. “They make ’em fork over a buck on payday.”

The lights flickered.

Every laborer in the mucking gang dropped their picks and shovels and fled down the tunnel. They ran in headlong confusion toward the shaft, splashing through the ankle-deep water, tripping on the muck car tracks, shoving and trampling each other in their panic. The foreman charged after them, bellowing to no avail.

Isaac Bell followed at his own pace. There would be a long wait for the hoist to come down the shaft and load all the men. Nor could he believe that the Hudson River had breeched a thousand feet of stone.

But when he got to the surface, rumor was rampaging through the labor camp, infecting not only the panicked Italian laborers but the Irish and German engineers, machine operators, foremen, and Board of Water Supply Police, and the Negro rock drillers and mule drivers. The Black Hand had sabotaged the siphon. The Hudson River had broken into the tunnel. Even the engineers, who should know better, were scratching their heads. Was the tunnel lost?

None of it was true, and it would be cleared up. The rock water would be pumped down, the cleft seam grouted, and the digging would continue. But, at the moment, newspaper scouts were wiring New York. On Manhattan and Brooklyn streets fifty miles away, newsboys would soon be hawking the baseless story.

“Extra! Extra!”

Bell cornered the pressure tunnel contractor who had welcomed the Van Dorn protection. He was a hearty, bluff, serious man with no nonsense about him. Like many of the contractors, he personally supervised his job. Was it true, Bell asked, that the likelihood of encountering water-bearing seams had been predicted?

“Between you, me, and the lamppost, diamond drill borings ahead indicated we’d run into water. Not so much it would stop excavation of the siphon tunnel, but enough to have to deal with. We knew we’d have to grout off the seam.”

“How many people knew?”

“Just a handful, and all in the ‘family’—engineers, me, fellows operating the diamond drill.”

“Could any of them have told the Black Hand?”

“I don’t follow you, Detective.”

“I showed you the letter,” Bell said. “I’m asking whether the Black Hand caught a lucky break that you hit water right after they threatened the tunnel? Or did the Black Hand know you would hit water and timed their threat to coincide with it?”

“The Black Hand extorts Italian labor, not American engineers. You can bet no one told them directly. But all it would take is one guinea a little smarter than the rest, cocking his ears for the inside word.”

Bell said, “In other words, the Black Hand rode free.”

“Truth will come out soon enough. The tunnel is doing fine.”

But Antonio Branco’s damage was done, thought Bell. The Black Hand looked powerful; the aqueduct looked vulnerable. He was hurrying from the contractor’s shack when a long-distance telephone call came in from an anxious Joseph Van Dorn, who had just returned to New York.

“Were any of our boys drowned in the flood?”

“There is no flood.”

“The newspapers say the Hudson River flooded the tunnel.”

“Utterly untrue,” said Bell. “Unfortunately, the Black Hand will take credit for sabotage.”

“They just did. We got another letter.”

“Was it addressed to Marion?”

“Like the last. He crows about the flood and threatens worse if the city doesn’t pay.”

Isaac Bell said, “We have to hit them before they attack.”

“Agreed,” said Van Dorn. “What do you propose?”

“Catch Branco with Culp.”

“How do you intend to do that?”

“Raid Raven’s Eyrie.”

34

Twelve brawny, athletic Van Dorn detectives studied the illustrated map of Raven’s Eyrie that Isaac Bell chalked on the bull pen blackboard. He had left his undercover men at Storm King when Van Dorn authorized hauling in reinforcements from Philadelphia, Boston, and Baltimore. They listened, commented, and queried while Bell pointed out features of the estate the raiders would hit upon.

“Main house. Gymnasium, including guest quarters and Culp’s trophy room. Stable. Auto garage. Boathouse. Wall — two miles around and, at a minimum, eight foot high, enclosing one hundred sixty acres. Front gate and gatehouse. Service gate. Workers’ barracks.”

“How do you happen to know your way around, Isaac?”

“I got myself invited and stayed for dinner. The front gatehouse is impregnable. Steep approach and a gate that could stop locomotives. Culp even has rifle slits in the tower. The service gate’s not much easier. But there’s a high spot in the wall, here — out of sight of the service gate tower — where fit younger detectives can scramble over with grappling hooks, then drop rope ladders for the fellows who belly up to free lunches. We’ll cut telephone wires, and the private telegraph, as we go over. They’re a few yards farther along the wall.”

“Why don’t we cut the electricity while we’re at it? Put ’em in the dark.”

“Culp has his own power plant. It’s here.”

“You drew it like a church.”

“The power plant looks like a church. The steeple masks the smokestack. Now we’ve confirmed that Mrs. Culp is here in New York in their mansion on 50th Street, which makes things easier.”

“Screaming wives,” said a grizzled veteran from the Boston field office, “take all the fun out of busting down a door.”

“Worse than kids,” said another.

“There are no kids. But there are plenty of staff. Mrs. Culp has taken her majordomo with her, but there is everything else, from footmen, to cooks, to housemaids, to groundskeepers.”

“How about bodyguards?”

“Culp keeps a couple prizefighters in the gymnasium. They’ve got a room downstairs. So we’ll need a couple of boys to get them into manacles.”

“O.K. to shoot ’em in the leg if they resist?”

“Use your judgment.”

“Where do we take Culp and Branco?”

“Culp’s a big wheel in the Hudson Valley, so Mr. Van Dorn strongly suggests we avoid the local constabulary. We’ll have a boat here”—Bell pointed at the boathouse pier—“to run us across the river. Then hightail it to a New York Central special standing by at Cold Spring and straight to Grand Central. NYPD Captain Mike Coligney will come aboard at Yonkers and make the arrests the second we cross the city line.”

“What charge?”

“Harboring a fugitive for Culp. With more to come.”

“How about trying to kill the President?”

“If we can pin it on him,” said Bell. “The primary goal is to knock Culp out of commission so he can’t kill him.”

“What do we charge Branco with?”

“We’ll start with the murder of Brewster Claypool. That should give the DA time to establish a Black Hand case. Same goal, though: Take him out of action before he can do more damage.”

“How solid is the Claypool murder charge? Keeping in mind what the Italians do to witnesses.”

“Solid,” said Bell. “I’m the witness.”

“I have an idea,” said J. B. Culp.

The magnate was on his feet, looming over his desk in the trophy room, fists planted on the rosewood. Antonio Branco was pacing restlessly among the life-size kills. Culp waited for him to ask what his idea was, but the self-contained Italian never rose to the bait.

Culp tried again to engage him. “We kill two birds with one stone… Can you guess how, Branco?”

Branco stopped beside a suit of armor and ran his fingers across the chain mail. “We kill Roosevelt,” he said, “when he makes his speech at the aqueduct.”

Culp did not conceal his admiration. Branco was as sharp as Brew Claypool, as cynical, and as efficient. Lee’s and Barry’s corpses had disappeared as if they had never existed, along with their possessions and every sign they had ever occupied the rooms under the gym. The difference between Claypool and Branco was that Branco also had teeth, razor-sharp teeth.

“Good guess,” said Culp.

“Easy guess,” said Branco. “What better proof that the city can’t manage its water system than to drown the President in the aqueduct?”

“Drown? Is that how you’re going to do it?”

Branco said, “I promised not to saddle you with things you shouldn’t know,” and walked between the elephant tusks that framed the fortress door.

“Where are you going?”

“As I promised, you will not be saddled,” said Branco and walked out.

Culp lumbered after him. “Hold on, Branco. I want to know when you’re coming back.”

“Later.”

Branco followed a winding path through a forest of ancient fir trees and down the slope between the outside entrance to his rooms and the estate wall. Near the wall, he slid through a low break in a rock outcropping that opened into a small cave under the wall.

Only an experienced pick and shovel man would recognize the cave as a man-made construction of hidden mortar and uncut stone artfully laid to look like natural rubble cast off by a glacier. It had been built sixty years ago by Culp’s grandfather, a “station master” on the Underground Railroad, helping escaped slaves flee to Canada.

“Why?” Branco had asked, mystified. He had studied the family; none were known to be what Americans called do-gooders.

“He fell for a Quaker woman. She talked him into it.”

“Your grandmother?”

“Not bloody likely.”

Branco emerged outside the wall and hurried through another fir stand. The mule wagon full of barrels was waiting. The elderly Sicilian groom holding the reins obeyed Vito Rizzo’s last orders before his arrest as unquestioningly as, back at Prince Street, he had obeyed Branco’s to dump a sugar barrel in the river. The old man stared straight ahead and pretended he heard no one climb into a barrel behind him until Branco said, “Muoversi!”

Francesca Kennedy’s “confession” two weeks ago in the Prince Street church had been her last. The Boss had ordered a complete change of their routine. From then on, she reported by telephone from a public booth in Grand Central Terminal at three o’clock in the afternoon on odd-numbered days. On even days, she checked a box at the nearby post office. The letters contained instructions and money. The instructions included the number she would tell the telephone operator to give her. But for two weeks, whatever number she asked for rang and rang but was not answered.

This afternoon, three on the dot, he answered. “What sins?”

“Adultery.”

“I didn’t know he was married.”

“He’s not. But I’m supposed to be a widow, so it’s adultery until we marry, because, you see, the Church—”

“What have you learned from him?”

“You picked a good day to answer the phone. I just found out he’s going on a big raid.”

“Raid? What kind of raid?”

“A detective raid.”

“Why would he tell you that?”

“He broke a date. He had to tell me why.”

“Maybe he’s seeing someone else?”

“Not on your life,” she said flatly. “He’s mine.”

“Did he happen to say what he is raiding?”

“Some rich guy’s estate.”

“Where?”

“It’s way up the river.”

The Boss fell silent. The telephone booth had a little window in the paneling. Francesca could see hundreds of people rushing for trains. She had a funny thought. The Boss could be right next to her, right beside her, in another booth. He knew where she was, but she could only guess where he was.

“Did Detective Abbott happen to mention the rich man’s name?”

“Sure.”

“Why sure?”

“I asked him. You told me find out everything the Van Dorns are doing, remember?”

“I am puzzled that a private detective would tell you so much about a case he was working up.”

“I told you, he’s mine.”

“I find it hard to believe he would be that indiscreet, even with you.”

“Listen, he’s got no reason not to trust me. He’s the one who started us. I set it up so he thinks he made the first move at the Knickerbocker. In fact, lately I’ve been wondering—”

“What’s the rich man’s name?”

“Culp.”

Again the Boss fell silent.

“J. B. Culp, the Wall Street guy,” she added, and pressed her cheek to the glass to look down the row of booths. The angle was too shallow. She couldn’t see inside the other booths, only the operator’s stand at the head of the row and the pay clerk at his desk.

Still not a peep out of the Boss.

“It’s funny,” she said. “Everybody reads about J. B. Culp in the papers — the swell’s rich as Rockefeller. But only little old Francesca knows that a whole squad of detectives are going to bust his door like he’s operating a low-down bookie joint.”

“Did Detective Abbott tell you why the Van Dorns are raiding Culp’s estate?”

“No.”

“Did you ask?” the Boss said sharply.

“I nudged around it a little. He clammed up. I figured I better quit while I was ahead of the game.”

“When is the raid?”

Francesca laughed.

“What is funny?”

“When you read about it in the morning paper, don’t forget who told you first.”

“Tonight?”

The grappling hooks whistled, cutting the air. Isaac Bell and Archie Abbott swung their ropes in ever-growing circles, building momentum, then simultaneously let fly at the wall that loomed slightly darker than the cloud-shrouded night sky. The hooks cleared the top, twelve feet above their heads, and clanked against the back side. Bell and Abbott drew in the slack and pulled hard. The iron claws held.

“Cut the wires!”

It went like clockwork. Up the knotted ropes, over thick folds of canvas to cover the broken glass, drop the rope ladders, then down the inside and running along a mowed inspection track that paralleled the wall. There were no lights in the gymnasium, the barracks, or the boathouse. The main house was dark upstairs, but the ground floor was lit up like Christmas.

“Dinner in the dining room,” said Bell.

Bell sent two men to capture the prizefighters and another man down to the river to rendezvous with the boat. Then he and Archie Abbott led squads to the house. Bell took the back door, Archie the front.

“They’re here,” said Branco.

“This should be great fun,” said Culp. “Too bad you can’t observe in person. I’ll fill you in later.”

Branco was not convinced that it was a good idea, much less “great fun.” But they were on Culp’s home turf and it was up to Culp to call the shots. “Vamoose!” Culp told him. “While the going’s good.”

Branco opened a servants’ door hidden in the dining room paneling.

“Branco.”

“What is it?”

“I’m impressed that you came back, knowing the raid was coming. You could have disappeared and left me to it.”

“I need you,” said Branco. “No less, no more, than you need me.” He closed the door. A narrow, twisting staircase went down to the silver vault, which had been originally a slave hidey-hole. Branco unlocked it, let himself inside, and locked it again.

J. B. Culp snatched a heavy pistol from the sideboard, strode to his front door, and flung it open, shouting, “Mr. Bell, you are trespassing.”

35

“Detective Bell is at your back door,” said Archie Abbott. “I’m Detective Abbott. Put that gun down before you get hurt.”

J. B. Culp lowered his pistol and backed into his foyer, a large entryway flanked by twin reception rooms. “Judging by your red hair, I’d have recognized you anywhere, Detective Abbott. Even on my private property.”

Abbott said, “Judging by your ruddy complexion, blond hair, and blue eyes, you are not the fugitive Antonio Branco, but John Butler Culp, the man who is harboring him. Put your gun on the table.”

Culp said, “There are people here anxious to meet you and your”—he looked over the burly detectives crowding in behind Abbott—“gang.” Then he raised his voice.

“Sheriff!”

A big bruiser with an Orange County sheriff’s star on his coat stepped from one of the reception rooms. “You’re under arrest, Detective Abbott.”

“I am not,” said Archie Abbott.

“Boys,” the Sheriff called.

Six deputies entered from the other reception room carrying shotguns.

The Sheriff said, “You’re all under arrest.”

“For what?”

“We’ll start with trespassing.”

“We are not trespassing.”

“Drop your weapons and reach for the sky.”

“We are not trespassing,” Abbott repeated. “We are pursuing a fugitive Black Hand gangster named Antonio Branco.”

The Sheriff turned to Culp, who had a small smile playing on his face.

“Mr. Culp, sir, have you seen any fugitives on your property?”

“No.”

The Sheriff turned his attention back to Archie Abbott. “Do you have permits to carry those guns?”

“Of course. We’re Van Dorns.”

“Orange County permits?”

“Now, hold on, Sheriff.”

“You’re trespassing in Orange County. You’re carrying illegal weapons in Orange County. You are endangering public safety in Orange County. And if you are the Detective Abbott I heard Mr. Culp greet, the Orange County District Attorney has received reports about your radical tendencies.”

“Are you nuts? I’m a Princeton man.”

“Last chance: Raise your hands before we start shooting. My boys’ twelve-gauges don’t leave much for the surgeon.”

Isaac Bell walked into the foyer with his hands in the air, trailed by his squad similarly elevated. He saw Culp smirking ear to ear. Archie looked poleaxed. But the out-of-town Van Dorns were tough customers, and Bell intervened quickly before it turned bloody.

“Guns down, gents. Hands up. We’ll settle this later.”

Archie said, “He says he’s the Sheriff.”

Bell said, “The men at the back door are New York Army National Guard officers. And there’s a fellow eating a sandwich in the kitchen who represents the Governor. We’re skunked.”

“Sheriff!” said J. B. Culp.

“Yes, sir, Mr. Culp?”

“Get these trespassers off my property.”

“Yes, sir, Mr. Culp.”

“Lock ’em up. I’ll send someone to the jailhouse to press charges in the morning.”

Nine arrested Van Dorns were crammed into a cell in the county lockup that smelled like it was reserved for drunks. The other three had escaped on the boat.

“I want to know how they knew we were coming,” said Isaac Bell.

“They knew we were coming, didn’t they?” said Archie.

“Unless by amazing coincidence the Sheriff, the Army Guard, and the Governor’s man all dropped in on the same night,” said Isaac Bell.

Bell was seething. The cost of the botched raid was almost incalculable. Culp was in the clear. Branco was still on the loose, deadly as ever and protected by Culp. Culp had demonstrated his power to bring in big guns to defend his secret alliance with the gangster. While they had somehow managed the near impossible — catching wind ahead of time about a secret Van Dorn raid.

Archie repeated, “This is awful. They knew we were coming.”

“We will find out how,” Bell repeated.

Bell was dozing on his feet, shoulder to shoulder with the rest of his squad, when he heard Joseph Van Dorn thunder in full voice. The Boss stood outside the cell in a derby hat and a voluminous overcoat.

“Sorriest bunch of miscreants I’ve ever seen in one lockup. They’re an insult to the criminal classes. But hand them over anyway.”

The Sheriff looked abruptly awakened and very anxious. “Mr. Culp is going to be mighty angry.”

“Tell Mr. Culp to take it up with the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, which has federal jurisdiction over Orange County. Show him that letter the U.S. Attorney gave me to give to you. Open up, man! We have a train to catch. Come along, boys. Double-time… Lord, that jailhouse stink! Good thing I chartered a cattle car to take you home in.”

A scathing nod in Bell’s direction instructed him to join the Boss for a private word. They stood in the vestibule when the train left the station. Van Dorn’s voice was cold, his eyes colder.

“The U.S. Attorney owed me an enormous favor. Springing your squad cleared the books, and he made it abundantly clear that next time we’re on our own. So let me make it abundantly clear, Isaac: No Van Dorn detective will scale the Raven’s Eyrie wall again without my express permission.”

“Except, of course,” said Bell, “if we’re in hot pursuit of Antonio Branco.”

Van Dorn’s cheeks flared as red as his whiskers and the Boss was suddenly as angry as Bell had ever seen him. “If Antonio Branco is halfway over Culp’s wall and you are hanging by his ankles, wire me on the private telegraph and wait for my specific go-ahead.”

As the train neared the city, Archie Abbott whispered, “Isaac, I have to talk to you.”

Bell led him into the vestibule where Van Dorn had expressed his displeasure. “What’s up?”

“It was my fault, Isaac.”

“Everyone did their job. We hit, front and back, right on the nose. It’s not your fault they were waiting.”

“I’m afraid it was,” said Archie.

“What are you talking about?”

Abbott hung his head. He looked mortified, and it began to dawn on Isaac Bell that his old friend Archie Abbott was more deeply downcast than even the Raven’s Eyrie fiasco would warrant.

“What are you saying, Archie?”

“I think I was played for a sucker.”

“Who played you — the girl you’ve been seeing?”

“Francesca.”

“You told Marion you were ‘besotted.’”

“Totally.”

“What did you tell Francesca?”

“Only that I was going on a raid. I had to break a date. I said I’d be away overnight, up the river.”

“Archie…” Bell felt his head swimming. Culp was in the clear. Culp protected Branco.

“I just didn’t think.”

“Did you tell her we were after Culp?”

“No!.. Well, I mean, not really.”

“What the devil does ‘not really’ mean?” Bell exploded. “You either told her it was Culp or you didn’t.”

“I said it was Culp’s house. I didn’t say we were after Culp. It could have been anyone on the estate. I was sure that was the impression I left. Until—”

“Until Culp had the Sheriff and the Army Guard ambush us… What the devil were you thinking, Archie?… Sounds like you weren’t thinking.”

“Not clearly. What do you want me to do, Isaac? Should I resign?”

Isaac Bell looked him in the face. Not only were they the closest friends but Bell felt responsible for him because he had talked Archie into joining the Van Dorns. He said, “I have to think about it. And I have to talk to Mr. Van Dorn, of course.”

“He’ll fire me in a second.”

“He’s the Boss. I have no choice.”

“I should save him the trouble and quit.”

Archie should resign, thought Bell. He knew the Boss well enough to know that Van Dorn was in no mood to forgive. But he was getting the glimmer of an idea how he might turn the tables on Branco.

“You know, Archie, you’re still not thinking clearly.”

“What do you mean?”

“Pray this doesn’t get in the papers. Because if it does and your Francesca reads it, she will put two and two together and realize that the boss she ‘confessed’ to in that church is Branco. And she will also know that when Branco reads it, he will know that she knows. Branco went to great lengths to ensure that the criminals who carried out his orders could never implicate him, much less testify against him.”

“What are you saying?”

“How long will he let Francesca live?”

“I have to get to her first,” said Archie.

“We have to get to her first. She’ll know a lot about Branco’s crimes and, with any luck, what he plans next.”

“Wait a minute, Isaac. What does Branco care if Francesca exposes him? He’s exposed already.”

“When we catch him, he will stand trial, defended by the best lawyers money can buy. The prosecutor will need every break he can get. He will trade years off Francesca’s prison sentence for her testimony.”

“Prison?”

“Archie, you weren’t the first job she did for him. Just the easiest.”

36

“Where does Francesca live?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know? How could you not know where a woman you were seeing lives?”

“She never let me take her home. She was very proper.”

“‘Proper’?” Isaac Bell echoed sharply. As good as this plan was, he was still angry enough to throw Archie Abbott off the speeding train.

“Ladylike. I mean… modest… Well, you know what I mean.”

“Where would you meet up?”

“The Waldorf-Astoria.”

“How’d you manage that?” Bell asked. Archie was a socially prominent New Yorker, welcome in any Blue Book drawing room, but the Abbotts had lost their money in the Panic of ’93 and he had to live on his detective salary.

“Francesca’s quite well-off, and her husband had business at the hotel, so she has a good arrangement with the management.”

“You said you don’t know where she lives. Now you’re saying she lives at the Waldorf?”

“No, no, no. She just books us a room.”

“When were you supposed to see her next?”

“Tomorrow afternoon, actually.”

“Will she show up?”

“I have no idea.”

“I think she will,” said Bell.

“How do you know?”

“She will be curious about what you’ll tell her next.”

Again, Abbott hung his head. “How long are you going to rub salt in the wound?”

“Until I am absolutely sure that I can override a powerful impulse to knock your block off.”

Archie was late.

Francesca Kennedy had already luxuriated with a hot soak in the porcelain tub. Now, wrapped in a Turkish robe, she curled up in an armchair and let her eyes feast on the beautiful hotel room. It had a fine bureau with an etched-glass mirror, a marquetry headboard that matched the bureau, and French wallpaper. She peeked through the drapes; it was snowing again. Warm and cosy, she settled in with the afternoon newspaper.

Footsteps were muffled in the Waldorf’s carpeted halls, and she lowered the paper repeatedly to glance at the crack under the door, waiting for Archie’s shadow to fall across the sill.

“Are you an opera singer, sir?”

Antonio Branco gave the elevator runner a dazzling smile. “If I-a to sing-a, you will-a run holding ears. No, young fellow, I only look-a like one.”

Americans scorned and despised Italian immigrants, but they were amused by well-off Italians who dressed with style. A cream-colored cape, a matching wide-brimmed Borsalino, an ivory walking stick, and a waxed mustache did the job. His masquerade wouldn’t fool a Van Dorn detective, or anyone who had met him face-to-face, but it drew salutes from the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel doormen and bows from house detectives. Across the lobby and into the gilded elevator, he was questioned only by the starstruck boy running it.

“Floor, sir?”

“Sesto! That means floor seeze. Pronto!”

Francesca had worked her way to the back pages, where features were tongue-in-cheek.

Francesca flung off the terry robe and pulled on her clothing. She knew Branco. Not as a gangster, but as a wealthy grocer who had set her up in a small apartment with a stipend that allowed her to get off the streets. He hadn’t visited it in two years — not since, she realized now, she had been summoned to confession with the Boss. She had lived on tenterhooks, wondering when it would stop, but he had kept sending money and kept paying the rent.

She was stuffing her things into her bag when a shadow fell on the sill.

The lovely room was suddenly a trap. An interior door connected to an adjoining room. She gripped the knob with little hope. Locked, of course. She had only rented the one room, not the suite. She backed up to the window and pulled the drapes with even less hope. No fire escape; the Waldorf was a modern building with indoor fire stairs. No balcony, either. Only the pavement of 33rd Street, six stories down. She carried no knife on this job, no razor, no weapon that would warn Archie Abbott that she was trouble.

Antonio Branco opened the door with a key and swept into the room.

Francesca Kennedy backed against the window. “I was just reading about you.”

“I imagined you were.”

Though her mind was racing, nearly overwhelmed with fear, she was struck, as always, by how handsome a man he was. There was a sharpness to him she had not seen before, an alertness he had hidden, which made him even more vital. But when his expression hardened, he looked suddenly so familiar that she glanced at her own face in the bureau mirror, then back at his.

37

His eyes were as dead as hers when she did a job.

Branco’s flickered at the window, and she realized instantly how he would do her. Francesca Kennedy wouldn’t be the first young and beautiful suicide to jump to her death from an expensive hotel room. Fell for the wrong man?

He turned around to lock the door and was reaching for the latch, when it flew inward with explosive force, smashing into his face and hurling him across the room. The armchair in which Francesca had been reading stopped his fall and he kept his feet, blood pouring from his nose.

Archie Abbott burst through the door he had kicked open.

The tall, golden-haired Isaac Bell was right behind him.

The detectives bounded at Branco like wolves.

Branco had lightning reflexes. The Italian had retained his grip on his walking stick and managed to twist it around as Archie charged. He rammed the tip into Archie’s gut. Archie doubled over. Isaac Bell knocked the stick out of Branco’s hand. It flew into the drapes and dropped at Francesca’s feet. When she picked it up, she was shocked by the heavy weight of its steel core.

Bell and Branco traded punches, grappled and fell against the chair with Bell on top. Branco clamped his arms around the tall detective in a crushing grip. He surged to his feet. His bloodied face contorted with herculean effort, he lifted Bell’s hundred seventy-five pounds off the floor. Bell broke his grip and pounded Branco’s ribs. They tumbled past the bed. Bell crashed into the bureau, shattering the mirror. Branco whirled to the door. But Archie was up again, throwing a hard, expert punch that drove the gangster to his knees.

Francesca held the walking stick in both her hands and swung it like a baseball bat. It connected with a loud thud, and she dropped the stick and ran into the hall. Antonio Branco’s eyes opened wide in disbelief as Archie Abbott sagged to the floor.

Branco snatched up the stick. Isaac Bell was back on his feet. Branco aimed for his head, but Bell was too fast for him and ducked the blow. Branco swung again, but, as he did, the half-conscious Archie Abbott kicked him. Thrown off balance, Branco missed Bell’s head but caught him instead in the back of his knee. Bell’s leg flew out from under him, and Branco was out the door.

He saw Francesca racing down the hall.

“Come with me,” he called.

“You’ll kill me.”

She darted into a service stair. Branco ran past it to the end of the hall where, before going to her room, he had confirmed an escape route down a stair to the hotel kitchens.

Isaac Bell tore after them.

The hall was empty. He ran full tilt, spotted a service stair, and wrenched open its door, which emitted a scent of fresh linen. Then he saw blood farther along on the hall carpet. He ran to it, spotted another stain, and kept going until he found a second service stair.

It was dimly lit and smelled of cooking grease.

He cocked his ear to the sound of running feet and plunged after it. Three flights down, he passed a waiter, who was slumped, stunned, against the wall. Three more flights and he reached the kitchen at the bottom of the steps. Men were shouting. A woman screamed. Bell saw cooks in toques helping a white-jacketed sous-chef to his feet. They saw him coming and scattered.

“Where’d he go?” Bell shouted.

“Into the alley.”

They pointed at the door. Bell shoved through it. The alley was empty but for a set of footprints in the snow. At the end of it, crowds were hurrying along 33rd. Bell ran to the street. The sidewalks were packed and he couldn’t see farther than fifty feet in the snow. Branco could have run either way. He hurried back into the kitchen.

“Did you see a woman with him?”

“No.”

He asked directions to the laundry. A cook’s boy took him there and he began to search for Francesca Kennedy. Frightened laundresses pointed mutely at a laundry cart. Bell seized it with both hands and turned it over.

Isaac Bell borrowed manacles from a house detective and marched Francesca Kennedy back to the wrecked hotel room. Angry Waldorf detectives paced in the hall, steering curious guests past the open door. Archie was slumped on the armchair, holding his head, attended by the hotel doctor.

“Why did you hit me?” he asked Francesca. “Why didn’t you hit Branco? He was going to kill you.”

Francesca asked matter-of-factly, “What’s the difference? You were going to arrest me, and it’ll kill me when they hang me.”

Bell eased his grip on her arm and said quietly, “Why don’t we discuss ways we can arrange things so they don’t hang you?”

She raised her blue eyes to smile up at him and Bell forgave Archie for most of his stupidity. As he had told Marion, Francesca Kennedy was intoxicating — and then some.

“Shall we talk?” Bell prompted.

“I like talking,” said Francesca.

“So I’ve heard.”

She said, “Could we, by any chance, talk over dinner? I’m starving.”

“Good idea,” said Bell. “We’ll have dinner at Captain Mike’s.”

“I don’t know it.”

“It’s on West 30th in the Tenderloin.”

Captain “Honest Mike” Coligney of the 19th Precinct Station House posted a police matron outside the room he had provided for Isaac Bell to interrogate his prisoner.

“I hope you know what you’re doing, Isaac,” said Coligney. “That woman is poison.”

“I don’t know any one more familiar with Antonio Branco than she.”

“Even though they never met face-to-face.”

“He gave orders. She carried them out.”

Bell stepped inside the room and closed the door.

“What would you like for dinner?” was his first question.

“Could I have a steak?”

“Of course.”

“Could we possibly have a glass of wine?”

“I don’t see why not.” He stepped out of the room and handed Mike Coligney twenty bucks. “Best restaurant in the neighborhood — steaks, the fixings, a couple of glasses of wine, and plenty of dessert.”

“You’re wasting your dough,” Coligney said. “What makes you think she’ll turn on him? When she had a choice of braining Branco or Detective Abbott, she chose the detective.”

“The lady likes to talk and the deck is stacked against her.”

“As it damned well should be.”

“She knows that. From what she told me on the way over, she would be the last to claim angelhood.”

Bell went back inside. Francesca had remained where he had left her, seated at a small, rough wooden table that was bolted, like both chairs, to the concrete floor.

“You know, Isaac… It’s O.K. if I call you Isaac, isn’t it? I feel I’ve known you forever the way Archie talked about you… I’ve been thinking. I always knew it had to happen some time.”

“What had to happen?”

“Getting nailed.”

“Happens to the best,” said Bell.

“And the worst,” Francesca fired back. “You know something? Archie was my favorite job the Boss ever gave me.”

“I’m not surprised,” said Bell. “Archie is excellent company.”

“I had to buy wonderful clothes to be with him. Archie’s used to the best girls. I could spend like a drunken sailor and the Boss never complained.”

“Do you remember the first job you did for Branco?”

“I didn’t know it was Branco.”

“Of course not. You got it from the ‘priest,’ so to speak. Do you remember it?”

“Sure. There was this guy who owned a bunch of groceries in Little Italy. The Boss said he had to go. But it had to look natural.”

“How did you learn to make a murder look like natural causes?”

“Not that kind of natural. Natural! The grocery guy had a taste to do certain stuff to girls and he’d pay a lot for it. But everybody knows if a guy goes around houses doing that, one of these days some girl’s going to get mad enough to stab him. So when he got stabbed, he got stabbed, naturally.”

“Why did the Boss want him killed?”

“I never knew until now it was to get the guy’s business. It’s how Branco got to the big time, owning a string of shops. Big step on his way to the aqueduct job, right? Now he’s on top… Or was.”

“Could you tell me about the next job?”

Isaac Bell coaxed her along, story to story, and Antonio Branco emerged as a criminal as ruthless as Bell had expected. But the gangster was unerring in his ability to couple effective methods to precise goals.

Captain Coligney interrupted briefly when dinner arrived.

Francesca ate daintily and kept talking.

Bell asked, “How did you happen to meet the Boss?”

“I don’t really know. I got in trouble once — big trouble — and out of nowhere some gorillas come to my rescue, paid off the cops. One second I think I’m going up the river, next I’m scot-free. Then I get my first message to go to confession.” She cut another bite of porterhouse, chewed slowly, washed it down with a sip of wine, and reflected, “Sometimes things really work out great, don’t they?”

“Did you help him get the aqueduct job?”

“I sure did! I mean, I didn’t know then. But now… There was this guy, celebrating a big, big deal. Practically takes over a whorehouse for a weekend. Champagne, girls, the whole deck of cards. I went to confession. Next thing you know, the guy is dead. Before he died, he told me he won this huge city contract to provision the aqueduct. Guess who got the contract after he died?”

“Branco.”

“You got it, Isaac.”

“What was the last job you did for him?”

“Archie.”

“Were you supposed to kill him?”

Francesca Kennedy looked across the table at Bell and cocked an eyebrow. “Is Archie dead?”

Bell gave her the laugh she expected and said, “O.K. So what did Branco tell you to do with Archie?”

“Listen.”

“For anything in particular?”

“Anything to do with your Black Hand Squad.”

“What did you hear?”

“Not one damned thing.”

“But you learned about the raid?”

“Nothing until then. That was the first thing Archie spilled. And the last, I guess,” she added, glancing about the windowless room.

Bell asked her how she had informed Branco, now that he wasn’t a priest anymore, and she explained a system of mailboxes and public telephones.

“How about before Archie?”

“I did a double. A couple of cousins. You know what the Wallopers are?”

“Hunt and McBean?”

“Oh, of course you know. This was a strange one. Wait ’til you hear this, Isaac… Could I have a little more wine?”

“Take mine.” Bell tipped his glass into hers, and cleared the plates and flatware and stacked them in the corner. “How was it strange?”

“I picked up Ed Hunt at a party the Boss sent me to and took him to the hotel where the Boss had booked me a room. What I didn’t know was the Boss hid in the closet. All of a sudden, when Hunt fell asleep, he stepped out of the closet. I almost jumped out of my skin.”

“You saw his face?”

“No. It was dark. I never saw his face until this afternoon. Anyhow, he shooed me out — sent me to the next job — and next I hear, Hunt had a heart attack. Well, I have to tell you, Isaac, if he was going to have a heart attack, it would have been while I was still there.”

Bell said, “As I understand it, a stiletto played a role in the heart attack.”

“Big surprise,” said Francesca.

“You said you went on to the next job. What was that?”

“Hunt’s cousin, McBean. The Boss gave me strict orders. Don’t hurt him. Just put him to sleep and go home. Which I did. Just like with Hunt. Then I learned at confession that McBean’s alive and kicking, not like Hunt. So I’m thinking they made a deal. You hear anything about that?”

“I heard heroin changed hands,” said Bell.

“Which reminds me of a job I don’t think I told you about yet…”

Bell listened. One story blended into another, which reminded her of another. Suddenly, he asked, “What did you say?”

“I was telling you how he confessed to me.”

“Would you repeat that, please. What do you mean ‘confessed’? Branco confessed to you?”

“I mean, one night he confessed to me. In the church. I was trying to figure out how to do this guy he wanted dead. All of a sudden, it was like I was the priest, and he started telling me about the first man he ever killed — when he was eight years old, if you think I’m bad. You know what he said? It was ‘satisfying.’ Isn’t that a strange word to talk about murder. Satisfying? And when he was only eight?”

“I wouldn’t know,” said Bell. “What do you think?”

“I wouldn’t call it satisfying. I’d call it, like, finishing. Completing. Like, ‘That’s over,’ if you know what I mean. Anyway, then he told me how he killed a padrone who robbed him.”

“How does he kill?”

“He plans and he hides.”

“What do you mean?”

“He gets close to kill. To get close, you have to plan. Study the situation. Learn it cold. Then make a plan.”

“He told you that?”

“He taught me: Plan what to pretend. Pretend you’re reading a newspaper. Pretend you’re busy working. Or pretend you need help. To throw ’em off. You know what I mean, Isaac? He makes an art of it.”

“Of killing.”

“Yes, if you want to call it that.”

“So Branco was your teacher?”

“He taught me how to do it and not get killed. I owe him a lot, you could say. But what’s the difference now?”

“What else did he tell you?”

“You’re not listening, Isaac. He didn’t tell me that; he taught me.”

“Get so close that they can’t be afraid?”

“Plan to get so close that they let their guard down.”

“Thanks for the advice,” said Bell.

“What advice?”

Bell whipped the automatic from his shoulder holster and pressed the muzzle to her forehead.

“What are doing?”

“Francesca, reach into your blouse with two fingers.”

“What are you talking about, Isaac?”

“Lift out of your corset the steak knife you palmed at dinner.”

“What if I don’t?”

“I will blow your brains out,” said Bell.

“You’d be doing me a favor. Quicker than hanging. And a lot quicker than being locked in the bug house.”

Bell slid the muzzle down her nose and chin and neck and touched it to her shoulder. “This won’t kill you, but wherever you end up — bug house, prison, even escape — you’ll never use this arm again.”

The knife rang on the concrete.

“You look like a wreck,” said Archie Abbott when Isaac Bell finally stumbled into the Van Dorn field office.

Bell shook sleet off his coat and hat and warmed his hands over a radiator. “I feel like I’ve been up a week with that woman. She would not shut up.”

“Did she tell you anything useful?”

“How Branco will attempt to kill TR.”

“How does she know?”

“She was his apprentice. She knows how he operates. It won’t be a sniper or a bomb. It will be up close.”

38

They reported to the White House early in the morning. The President was exercising on a rowing machine. Van Dorn did the talking. When he had laid out the threat in succinct detail, he concluded, “For your own safety, Mr. President, and the good of the nation, I recommend curtailing your public appearances. And avoid al together any in the vicinity of the Catskill Aqueduct.”

“The aqueduct is the great enterprise of our age,” said President Roosevelt, “and I worked like a nailer to start it up when I was Governor. The very least I can do as President is lend my name and presence to the good men who took over the job. They’ll be at it for years, so celebrating the Storm King Siphon Tunnel is vital for morale.”

“Would you have the history books forever link the Catskill Aqueduct to your assassination?”

“Better than the history books saying, ‘TR turned tail and ran.’”

“I seem to have failed,” said Van Dorn, “in my effort to explain the danger.”

President Roosevelt hopped off his machine. “I grant you that J. B. Culp’s tendencies toward evil are indisputable. Culp is the greatest practitioner of rampant greed in the nation. His underhanded deals rend a terrible gulf between the wealthy few and the millions who struggle to put a meal on the table. Unchecked, his abuses will drive labor to revolution. He is as dangerous as the beast in the jungle and as sly as the serpent. But you have not a shred of evidence that he would attempt to assassinate me.”

“Nor do I have any doubt,” said Van Dorn.

“You have hearsay. The man is not a killer.”

“Culp won’t pull the trigger himself,” said Isaac Bell.

The President glanced at Van Dorn, who confirmed it with a grave nod.

“Of course,” said Roosevelt. “A hired hand. If any of this were true.”

“Antonio Branco is no hired hand,” said Bell. “He is personally committed to killing you. He’ll call in a huge marker that Culp will be happy to pay.”

“Poppycock!”

Van Dorn started to answer. Isaac Bell interrupted again.

“We would not be taking up your valuable time this morning if the threat were ‘poppycock,’ Mr. President. You say you worry about revolution? If the atmosphere is so volatile, couldn’t a second presidential assassination, so soon after the last, trigger that revolution?”

“I repeat,” Roosevelt barked. “Poppycock! I’m going to the Catskill Mountains. If your lurid fancies have any basis in truth, I’ll be safe as can be on the Navy’s newest battleship.”

“May I ask, Mr. President, how do you happen to be traveling to the Catskill Mountains by battleship?”

“Up the Hudson River to Kingston, where we’ll board an Ulster & Delaware special to inspect the reservoir, eventually take the special down to the siphon.” He laughed and said to Van Dorn, “Shall I order the railroad to lay on an armored train?”

“I’ll see to it,” said Van Dorn.

“I’ll bet you will and slap the government with a mighty bill.”

Van Dorn’s expression could have been a smile.

Isaac Bell said, “Sir, will you please agree to obey closely instructions your Secret Service corps issue for your protection?”

“Of course,” the President answered with a sly grin. “So long as I can make my speech… Listen here, young fellow, you run down those supposed criminals. I’ll speechify the greatest aqueduct ever dug and”—he plunged a hand into his pocket and he pulled out a crumpled bill—“five bucks says my battleship and I finish first.”

Isaac Bell slapped down a gold coin. “Double it.”

“You’re mighty sure of yourself.”

“You’ll have to trade your battleship for ice skates, Mr. President. Last time I looked, the Hudson River was freezing solid.”

“Connecticut’s eleven-inch armor belt will smash ice.”

Isaac Bell held off reminding the Commander-in-Chief that USS Connecticut’s armor tapered to only four inches in her bow, but he could not resist saying, “Far be it from me to advise a military man, Mr. President, but how do your admirals feel about the Connecticut smashing ice with her propeller blades?”

TR threw up his hands. “O.K., O.K. I’ll take the train. That satisfy you?”

“Only canceling your public appearances until we nail Culp and Branco will satisfy me.”

“Then you’re bound for disappointment. I’m going and that’s all there is to it. Now get out of here. I have a country to run.”

Bell and Van Dorn retreated reluctantly.

“Wait!” Roosevelt called after them, “Detective Bell. Is that true?”

“Is what true, Mr. President?”

“The Hudson River is freezing early.”

“It’s true.”

“Bully!”

“Why ‘bully,’ sir?”

“They’ll be racing when I’m there.”

Van Dorn asked, “What kind of racing?”

“Fastest racing there is. Ice yacht racing.”

“Do you race, sir?” asked Bell.

“Do I race? Cousin John founded the Hudson River Ice Yacht Club. His Icicle cracked one hundred miles per hour and won the Challenge Pennant. Ever been on an ice yacht, Detective?”

“I skippered Helene in the Shrewsbury regattas.”

“So you’re a professional?”

“I was Mr. Morrison’s guest,” said Bell, and added casually, “Culp races ice yachts, you know?”

“Daphne!” shouted the President. “Fast as greased lightning!” He flashed a toothy grin. “Just goes to show you, Bell, the Almighty puts some good in every man — even J. B. Culp.”

The President’s hearty ebullience offered an opening and Bell seized it. “May I ask you one favor, sir?”

“Shoot.”

“Would you make your speech at the Hudson River Siphon your only speech?”

Roosevelt considered the tall detective’s request for such an interim that Bell saw reason to hope that the President was finally thinking of the assassination that had flung him into office.

“O.K.,” he answered abruptly. “Fair enough.”

Joseph Van Dorn was staying on in Washington, but he rode with Isaac Bell on the trolley to the train station. “That was a complete bust,” he said gloomily. “One speech, ten speeches, what’s the difference? Everywhere he stops, the reckless fool will wade into the crowds — knowing full well that McKinley got shot while shaking hands.”

“But his only scheduled appearance will be the speech. Branco will know precisely where and when to find him at the Hudson Siphon — the only place the President will be a sitting duck.”

“That is something,” Van Dorn conceded. “So how do we protect the sitting duck?”

Isaac Bell said, “Clamp a vise around Branco. Squeeze him.”

“To squeeze him, you’ve got to find him.”

“He’s holed up in Culp’s estate.”

“Still?” Van Dorn looked skeptical. “Where’d you get that idea?”

“Culp’s private train,” answered Bell. “I sent Eddie Edwards to nose around the crew. Eddie bribed a brakeman. It seems that ordinarily by November, Culp spends weekdays in town, but the last time he left the property, he took his train to Scranton and came back the same night.”

“I wouldn’t call that definitive proof that Branco’s holed up with him.”

“Eddie’s brakeman is courting a housemaid at Raven’s Eyrie. She tells him, and he tells Eddie, that Culp is sticking unusually close to home. She also says the boxers don’t live there anymore. And we already knew that Culp’s wife decamped for the city. Add it all up and it’s highly likely that Branco’s in the house.”

“Yet Branco’s been to town, and he’s still bossing his gangsters.”

Bell said, “I have your Black Hand Squad working round the clock to find how he gets out and back in.”

The letter was waiting for Joseph Van Dorn when he got to the New Williard.

“May the angels preserve me,” said Joseph Van Dorn.

Deeply relieved by the unexpected glimmer of common sense in the postscript, Van Dorn telephoned a civil servant, a former Chicagoan who now led the Secret Service protection corps. “The President has asked me to ride along on the Catskills trip. I don’t want to get in your way, so I need your blessing before I accept.”

His old friend gave an exasperated snort, loud enough to hear over the phone. “The Congress still questions who should protect the President and whether he even needs protection. Nor will they pay for it, so I’m juggling salaries from other budgets. And now they’re yammering that one of my boys was arrested for assault for stopping a photographer from lunging at the President and Mrs. Roosevelt with a camera that could have concealed a gun or knife. In other words, thank you, Joe, I am short of qualified hands.”

“I will see you on the train,” said Van Dorn. And yet, in his heart of hearts he knew that when some bigwig persuaded the President to let him stand beside him, the founder of the Van Dorn Detective Agency would end up too far away to intercept an attacker.

Between the Raven’s Eyrie wall and the foot of Storm King Mountain, the estate’s telegraph and telephone wires passed through a stand of hemlock trees. Isaac Bell and a Van Dorn operative, who had been recently hired away from the Hudson River Bell Telephone Company, pitched a tent in the densest clump of the dark green conifers.

Bell strapped climbing spikes to his boots and mounted a telegraph pole. He scraped insulation from the telephone wires and attached two lengths of his own wire, which he let uncoil to the ground. He repeated this with the telegraph wires and climbed back down, where the operative had already hooked them up to a telephone receiver and a telegraph key.

An eight-mule team hauled a heavy freight wagon up to the Raven’s Eyrie service gate. A burly teamster and his helper wrestled enormous barrels down a ramp and stood them at the shoulder of the driveway. They were interrupted by a gatekeeper who demanded to know what they thought they were doing.

“Unloading your barrels.”

“We didn’t order any barrels.”

The teamster produced an invoice. “Says here you did.”

“What’s in ’em?”

“Big one is flour and the smaller one is sugar. Looks like you’ll be baking cookies.”

The gatekeeper called for the cook to come down from the kitchen. The cook, shivering in a cardigan pulled over her whites, looked over the flour barrel, which was as tall as she was. “This is a hogshead. There’s enough in it to feed an army.”

“Did you order it?”

“Why would I order a hogshead of flour and a full barrel of sugar at the end of the season?” she asked rhetorically. “Maybe they’re meant to go to 50th Street. That’s their winter palace in New York City,” she added for the benefit of the teamster and hurried back to her kitchen.

“You heard her,” said the gatekeeper. “Get ’em out of here.”

The teamster climbed back on his rig.

“Hey, where you going?”

“To find a crane to lift ’em back on the wagon.”

The gatekeeper called the estate manager. By the time he arrived, the wagon had disappeared down the road. The estate manager gave the hogshead an experimental tug. It felt like it weighed six hundred pounds.

“Leave it there ’til he comes back with his crane.”

“Good Lord,” said Joseph Van Dorn.

Whether the President wore a top hat, a fedora, or even a Rough Rider slouch hat, Van Dorn would wear the same — and wire-framed spectacles — to confuse a sniper. He would even have to shave the splendiferous sideburns he had cultivated for twenty years.

Ten men and women dressed in shabby workers’ clothes got off the day coach train from Jersey City and marched out of Cornwall Landing and up the steep road to Raven’s Eyrie. When they were stopped at the front gate, they unfurled banners and began to walk in a noisy circle. The banners demanded:

and accused the Philadelphia Streetcar Company, owned by the United Railways Trust, of unfair treatment of its track workers.

The workers chanted:

The Sheriff was called. He arrived with a heavyset deputy, who climbed out of the auto armed with a pick handle. Two more autos pulled up, with newspaper reporters from Poughkeepsie, Albany, and New York City.

“How’d you boys get here so fast?” asked the Sheriff, who had a bad feeling that he was about to get caught between the Hudson Valley aristocracy and the voting public.

“Got a tip from the workers’ lawyers,” explained the man from the Poughkeepsie Journal.

“Did J. B. Culp instruct you to disperse this picket line?” asked the Morning Times.

The progressive Evening Sun’s reporter was beside himself with excitement. Ordinarily, the biggest news he covered in the Hudson Valley was the state of the winter ice harvest. He had already wired that the intense cold meant harvesting would start so early that the greedy Ice Trust would not be able to jack up prices when the city sweltered next August.

Now, outside the Wall Street tycoon’s gates, he put the screws to privilege: “Sheriff, has J. B. Culp instructed you to permit or deny these American citizens to exercise their constitutional right to free assembly?”

“There’s an inch of ice on the river, Isaac. They’ve hauled all their boats out of the water at Raven’s Eyrie, and I just saw that the signboard at the passenger pier says the steamers are stopping service for the winter.”

“I sent Archie to Poughkeepsie to buy an ice yacht.”

“I’m amazed that Joe Van Dorn authorized such an expense.”

“This one’s on me,” said Bell. “I want a special design. Fortunately, my kindly grandfather left me the means to pay for it.”

Isaac Bell found New York Police Department Detective Sergeant Petrosino’s Italian Squad in a small, dimly lit room over a saloon on Centre Street. Exhausted plainclothes operatives were slumped in chairs and sleeping on tables. Joe Petrosino, a tough, middle-aged cop built short and wide as a mooring bollard, was writing furiously at a makeshift desk.

“I’ve heard of you, Bell. Welcome to the highlife.”

“Do you have time to talk?” said Bell with a glance at those detectives who were awake and watching curiously.

“My men and I have no secrets.”

“Nor do I and mine,” said Bell. “But I am sitting on dynamite and I’m obliged to keep it private.”

“When a high class private investigator offers me dynamite, I have to ask why.”

“Because Harry Warren thinks the world of you. So does Mike Coligney.”

“Mike and I have Commissioner Bingham in common. He’s been… helpful to us both.”

Bell answered carefully. “I do not believe that Captain Coligney reckons that this particular dynamite is up the Commissioner’s alley.”

Petrosino clapped a derby to his head and led Bell downstairs.

They walked the narrow old streets of downtown. Bell laid out the threat.

“Have you informed the President?”

“Mr. Van Dorn and I went down to Washington and told him face-to-face.”

“What did he say?”

“He refused to believe it.”

Petrosino shook his head with a bitter chuckle. “Do you remember when King Umberto was assassinated by Gaetano Bresci?”

“Summer of 1900,” said Bell. “Bresci was an anarchist.”

“Since he had lived in New Jersey, the Secret Service asked me to infiltrate Italian anarchist cells to investigate whether they were plotting against President McKinley. It was soon clear to me they were. I warned McKinley they would shoot him first chance they got. McKinley wouldn’t listen. He took no precautions — ignored Secret Service advice and let crowds of strangers close enough to shake his hand. Can you explain such nonsense to me?”

“They think they’re bulletproof.”

“After McKinley died, they said to me, ‘You were wrong, Lieutenant Petrosino. The anarchist wasn’t Italian. He was Polish.’”

“I know what you mean,” Bell commiserated. “I’m pretty much in the same boat you were.”

“How do these fools get elected?”

“People seem to want them.”

Petrosino gave another weary chuckle. “That’s cop work in a nutshell: Protect fools in spite of themselves.”

Isaac Bell asked, “Who do you think Antonio Branco will hire to kill the President?”

“If he doesn’t do the job himself?”

“He may well,” said Bell. “But for the sake of covering all bases, who would he hire?”

“He’s got a choice of Black Hand gorillas or radical Italian anarchists,” said Petrosino. “Pray it’s gorillas.”

“Why’s that?”

“Criminals trip themselves up worrying about getting away. The crazy anarchists don’t mind dying in the act. They don’t even think about getting away, which makes them so dangerous.”

“Do you have a line on Italian anarchists?” Bell asked.

“Most of them.”

“Could you take them out of commission when the President goes to Storm King?”

“The lawyers will howl. The newspapers will howl. The Progressives will howl.”

“How loudly?”

Petrosino grinned. “I been a cop so long, so many gunfights, my ears are deaf.”

“Thank you,” said Bell. “I hope the Van Dorn Agency can return the favor one day. What about the gorillas?”

“Too many. I’ll never find them all. But like I say, they’re not as dangerous as anarchists.”

“Well done on the anarchists!” Joseph Van Dorn said when Bell reported. “But the assurance that ‘gorillas’ are not as dangerous as radicals doesn’t exactly make me rest easy. Particularly as the President has decided to make your ‘one speech only’ open to all. He wired me this morning that he’s going to lead the workmen in a parade.”

“A parade,” said Bell with a sinking heart. What if he was wrong about Branco killing in close? A parade was an invitation to a sniper, and a criminal as freewheeling as Branco could change tactics in an instant.

Van Dorn echoed his thoughts. “The parade is madness. He intends to lead it in the Steamer. I asked, would he at least put up the automobile’s top? Look what he wired back.”

Van Dorn thrust a telegram across his desk.

Bell asked, “Who’s marching in the parade?”

“Everyone.”

“Even the Italians?”

“Especially the Italians. Last we spoke in Washington, he had a bee in his bonnet about immigrants learning English to facilitate fair dealings between classes of citizens. He was tickled pink when I told him that the Italian White Hand Society is our client and what fine English Vella and LaCava speak.”

“Why don’t you invite Vella and LaCava to the parade?”

“Excellent idea! I’ll bet TR shakes their hands.”

“Invite Caruso and Tetrazzini, while you’re at it.”

“I wouldn’t call either sterling pronunciators of the King’s English.”

“Any hand the President shakes that is not a stranger’s hand will make me happy,” said Bell. “Along with a snowstorm to blind the snipers.”

Van Dorn turned grave. “But in the event that a providential snowstorm doesn’t blind a sniper, how else are you closing the vise around Branco?”

“My operators are watching Culp’s gates and his boat landing round the clock.”

“I thought you told the President the river was frozen.”

“I put a man on an ice yacht.”

“Where’d you get an ice yacht?”

“Bought myself one in Poughkeepsie.”

“Who other than you knows how to sail it?”

“Archie Abbott.”

“I wondered where that fool had gotten to. What else are you doing?”

“I have a tapper up a pole listening to the Raven’s Eyrie telephone.”

“Outside the walls?” asked Van Dorn.

“Yes, sir. Outside.”

“What about telegraph?”

“It’s all in cipher.”

“I would lay off the telegraph wire. Culp conducts business from the estate. Telephone tapping is one thing; the law’s so murky. But we don’t want to be liable to charges of telegraph tapping for inside knowledge of Culp’s stock market trades. What else?”

“What else would the Chief Investigator recommend?” Bell asked his old mentor.

Van Dorn sat behind his desk silently for a while. He gazed into the middle distance, then made a tent with his fingers and stared inside it. At last he spoke. “Go back to that woman.”

“Francesca?”

“Find out what she didn’t tell you.”

Bell was itching to return to his detectives watching Raven’s Eyrie and guarding the siphon tunnel dig. “She already admitted to every crime in the book.”

Van Dorn said, “She knew she was headed to prison, at best, and more likely the hangman. She may have talked your ear off, but she’s drowning, Isaac. She had to hold on to something, something for herself.”

Archie Abbott woke before dawn in a cold bed in a cold room. He pulled on heavy underclothing and over it a snug suit of linen. Then he donned thick woolen hose, trousers, and waistcoat. He encased his feet in high felt boots. Finally, he buttoned a fur jacket over the woolen waistcoat and a pea jacket over the fur. He covered his head and ears with a fur hat and pulled goggles over his eyes.

He stepped outside, crossed the New York Central Railroad tracks, and hurried down to the frozen river. His ice yacht waited in a boathouse at the edge of the cove. The runners were frozen to the ice. He kicked them loose and pushed the yacht outside.

The breeze in the shelter of the cove was barely enough to stir the pennant at the masthead. But Isaac Bell had commissioned an exotic doozy from J. B. Culp’s own builder, with fifty extra feet of sail and lead ballast to try to keep from flipping upside down in a squall, and that breath of air started it moving like a restless horse. Abbott climbed hastily onto the car — the cockpit at the back end — and grabbed the tiller just as the yacht bolted onto the open river.

A bitter breeze struck the rigid sail. Abbott sheeted it in tight and concentrated on the tiller to dodge oversize ice hummocks, rocks along the shore, and wind skaters flashing by with sails on their backs. She was a light-footed gazelle. She felt like she was making thirty miles an hour until they overtook a New York Central express. Judging by the locomotive’s flattened smoke, Isaac Bell’s ice yacht was cracking forty-five.

When the sun cleared Breakneck Mountain and cast thin, cold rays on Storm King on the other side of the river, Archie turned the boat toward Raven’s Eyrie. Unlike the other Hudson River estates where lawns rose from the water’s edge, Culp’s place was easily recognized by the fir trees that screened its walls.

He crossed the frozen water in a flash and commenced the first of many cold, cold passes by Culp’s dock. Some Van Dorn had to freeze half to death keeping vigil and Abbott was the one, atoning for his stupidity and staying out of sight of the Boss on the slim chance that Antonio Branco may suddenly embark by ice yacht. At least Isaac hadn’t condemned him to be one of the operatives on hogshead duty — watching from inside the barrel left at the service entrance and spelling each other only in the dark — though he would have if Archie wasn’t too tall to fit.

Other boats started skittering down the river, flying Poughkeepsie and Hudson River Ice Yacht Club burgees and speeding, like his, on the edge of a smashup. Archie joined in impromptu races with them and the sail skaters. Bell had issued strict orders not to draw attention by winning races, for word of a new fast boat would get back to J. B. Culp in a flash. But it was still a welcome change of pace and a natural cover for the Van Dorn watch.

The visiting room in the women’s section of the Tombs was divided by a wall broken with a small mesh-covered window. Francesca Kennedy looked so gaunt that Isaac Bell suspected their steak dinner had been the last she had eaten. Her face was pale, her expression sullen.

“What are you doing here?”

“I came for what you didn’t tell me,” Bell said bluntly.

“Didn’t I give you enough to send me to the gallows? Oh, what am I talking about? I keep forgetting.”

“Forgetting what?”

“It’s not the hangman anymore. It’s the electric chair.”

“I came—”

“Go away, Isaac. Anything I didn’t tell you I didn’t want to tell you.”

She was seated on a stool. Bell indicated the stool on his side. “May I sit down?”

She ignored him.

Bell pulled up the stool and sat face-to-face with her, inches from the mesh. “I came to change your mind.”

“Forget it.”

“I’ve spoken with some men in the prosecutor’s office. It is possible that I can persuade the District Attorney to offer you some kind of a break.”

“You want to give me a break? Get me out of here.”

“I can’t.”

“Let me go home.”

“I can’t.”

“So I can’t remember what I didn’t tell you.”

“I can’t get you out of jail, Francesca. No one can. But maybe I can make it better.”

She glanced about her. “Better than this wouldn’t be hard.”

“I’m thinking of much better. If we can convince a judge that you should be in an asylum.”

“I don’t think the bug house is better.”

“There are still some excellent private sanitariums.”

“Really? How excellent?”

“For wealthy patients. Very wealthy patients.”

“I’m not wealthy, Isaac. And I’m sure as heck not very wealthy.”

“I can arrange it,” said Bell.

“Pay out of your own pocket?”

“The agency will pay at first. At some point after we seize Branco’s assets, we can tap into them.”

“Won’t the government keep them?”

“Not if the Van Dorn Agency deserves a bounty. And certainly not if we, in essence, pay you for your testimony against Branco with Branco’s money.”

“That would be ironic.”

“How so?”

“Is this on the square?” she asked, and for the first time she let Bell see that she was scared.

“Yes.”

“You’ll really do it?”

“You have my word you will get a square deal.”

Francesca Kennedy nodded. “I’ll take your word… Shake on it.” She slipped her fingers through the mesh. Bell squeezed them before the matron interrupted with a sharp “No hands!”

Francesca flashed her a pleasant smile and said, “Sorry.” To Bell she whispered, “It’s ironic, because Branco used to be a regular customer.”

“You knew Branco? You said you didn’t.”

“Not as the Boss… I didn’t lie to you, Isaac. I just didn’t tell you everything.”

“When was this?” asked Bell, thinking to himself, Bless Joseph Van Dorn for steering him back to her. The “old man” had invented the best tricks in the detective book.

Francesca took a deep breath. “Back when I was streetwalking. He set me up in an apartment. All I knew was, he was a rich grocer. Gave me this little apartment and a few bucks a week if I’d stay off the streets. I said to him, ‘What are you, jealous of my other customers?’ and he said, ‘You’ll get killed on the street and you’re too valuable to get killed.’ Fine with me. Nicest thing anyone ever said to me. Besides, he was right. You die on the street; it’s just a matter of time. Anyhow, ’til he showed up at the Waldorf, I hadn’t seen him in ages — not since I started ‘confessions’ with the Boss. But he had kept sending the dough and paying the rent.”

“Didn’t you recognize his voice?”

“Not through the grille. And he talked different, too. Different words. I feel kind of dumb, but I never thought for a second he was the same man.”

“Where was the apartment?” asked Bell.

“I still have it. Or did ’til now.”

“Would he hide there?”

Francesca shrugged. “He never came to my place. When he wanted me, we’d meet at an apartment he kept on Prince Street.”

“His home that blew up?”

“No, he didn’t live there. I never saw his home. Our place was over near Broadway. He just kept it for me. And whoever else I guess he had.”

“What was the address?”

Antonio Branco returned to Raven’s Eyrie the way he had left, through the cave. His handsome face was battered from the fight with Bell and Abbott, both eyes blackened, his nose swollen.

“Detectives are watching my safe house.”

“You’ve become a less valuable asset,” J. B. Culp shot back.

“It means nothing.”

“You are turning into a liability.”

Culp was ready to pick up a gun and shoot him. End this whole thing before it got worse. He had his story ready: Italian fugitive snuck in here. I caught him trying to steal my guns. Thank God I got the drop on him. Reward? No thank you, give the money to charity.

He was about to turn around and pluck the Bisley off the wall when Branco surprised him by answering mildly, “I am moving my business to Canada.”

“Canada?”

“I have padrone business in Montreal. The railroads are hungry for labor. The Italian colony grows larger every day, and many owe me their place in it. A good place to lay low.”

“What about our deal?”

“I’ll stay here until we’ve finished Roosevelt. After, I’ll run my end from Canada. It’s easy to travel back and forth. The border is wide open.”

“What about your big idea to discredit the city aqueduct? How can you do that in Canada?”

Branco spoke mildly again, but his answer made no sense. “Would you look at your watch?”

“What?”

“Tell me the time.”

“Time to make a new arrangement, like I’ve been telling you all morning.”

“What time is it?” Branco repeated coldly.

Culp tugged a thick gold chain. “Two minutes to eleven.”

Branco raised two fingers. “Wait.”

“What? Listen here, Branco—”

“Bring your field glasses.”

Branco strode into an alcove framed with tusks and out a door onto a balcony. The day was cold and overcast. Snow dusted the hills. The frozen river was speckled with ice yachts and skate sailors skimming the glassy surface. He gazed expectantly at Breakneck Mountain, three-quarters of a mile opposite his vantage on Storm King.

Culp joined him with binoculars. “What the devil—”

The Italian stilled him with an imperious gesture. “Watch the uptake shaft.”

A heavy fog of steam and coal smoke loomed over the lift machinery at the top of the shaft, the engine house, and the narrow-gauge muck train. Culp raised his field glasses and had just focused on the mouth of the siphon uptake when suddenly laborers scattered and engineers leapt from their machines.

“What’s going on?”

Branco said, “Remember who I am.”

A crimson bolt of fire pierced the smoke and steam and shot to the clouds. The sound of the explosion crossed the river seconds later and reverberated back and forth between Breakneck Mountain and Storm King.

Culp watched men running like ants, then focused on the wreckage of the elevator house. It appeared that the lift cage itself had fallen to the bottom of the thousand-foot shaft, which was gushing black smoke.

“What in blazes was that?”

“Four hundred pounds of dynamite to discredit the city.”

39

The New York newspapers arrived on the morning train.

“The papers got it wrong. As usual,” Wally Kisley told Isaac Bell. “The contractor runs an up-to-date enterprise. There weren’t any fuses to ignite. They fire the shots electrically.”

“Are you certain it was sabotage?” asked Bell.

“Sabotage with a capital S. Very slick timing device. You gotta hand it to these Eye-talians, Isaac. They are masters of dynamite.”

Kisley sat down abruptly. Bell reckoned that the long trek down to the tunnel and back up by makeshift bosun’s chairs and rickety ladders had exhausted him. But to Bell’s astonishment, the tough old bird covered his face with his hands.

“You O.K., Wally?”

Kisley took a breath. “I can’t claim I’m a stranger to carnage.”

Bell nodded. Kisley and Mack Fulton and Joe Van Dorn had worked on the Haymarket Massacre case to determine who had thrown the bomb, and, in the ensuing twenty years, scores more bombing cases. “Goes with the job,” he said softly.

“The men were hammered. The tunnel looked like a reefer car leaving the slaughterhouse.”

J. B. Culp laughed. “No one will believe that.”

“That they had to print the lie,” Branco agreed, “tells us they are in terror.”

“What were Negroes doing down in the tunnel?” asked Culp.

“Best rock drillers in the business. And the contractor keeps some around in case Italians get any ideas of striking for higher wages.”

“What about this strike they’re talking about? Labor striking would make the city look like they lost control of the job. Will they strike?”

“They’ll strike when I tell them to strike,” said Antonio Branco.

“What are you waiting for?”

“Would President Roosevelt come here to make a speech if they were on strike?”

“Good question,” Culp conceded. “He might take a strike as a challenge… No, he’s too damnedly unpredictable.”

“That reminds me,” said Branco. “Can you pull wires to have the Italian Consul General invited to the ceremony?”

“Of course. I can’t promise you he’ll accept.”

“He’ll accept. He’s got his hands full with immigration complaints. He will make friends anywhere he can. And to be invited to hear the President’s speech will be an honor for all Italians.”

“This is beginning to annoy me,” said Marion Morgan.

She was feeling prison crazy, locked up in the Knickerbocker. Helen Mills was fine company, but she missed her job, the outdoors, the city streets, and, most of all, Isaac, who was working round the clock at Storm King. He had his detectives covering every base, but no matter how he tried, he could not find Antonio Branco.

“What do you want to do about them?” asked Helen.

“I wonder if Grady Forrer can help Isaac find how Branco gets in and out of Raven’s Eyrie.”

The women marched to the back of the Van Dorn offices, into the shabby rooms that housed Grady Forrer’s Research section. Scholars looked up from heaped desks. Researchers poked heads from crammed library stacks. Interviewers whispered, “I’ll call you back,” and hastily cradled their telephones.

“Welcome, ladies,” boomed Forrer, adding, sotto voce, over his shoulder, “Back to work, gents. I’ll take care of this.”

“Thank you, Grady,” said Marion Morgan. “But, in fact, we’re going to need everyone who has a few free moments to lend a hand.”

“What do you need?”

“The architects’ plans for Raven’s Eyrie.”

Twelve hours later, a deflated Grady Forrer apologized.

“The problem is the estate has been under almost continuous reconstruction for nearly a hundred years, starting shortly after Robert Fulton invented the steamboat and the first Culp destroyed his rivals in river commerce. The builders of J.B.’s New York mansion would have filed plans with various city departments, but apparently that was not the practice in the wilds of the Hudson Valley, at least in the face of bred-in-the-bone Culp hatred of government interference.”

Six hours later, when Grady had collapsed face-first on a cot and most of his young assistants had stumbled home, Marion suddenly whispered, “I’ll be darned.”

“What?” asked Helen.

Marion looked up from a folder of ancient yellowed newspapers. “Grandfather Culp had an affair with a Quaker woman from Poughkeepsie.”

“They printed that in the newspaper?”

“Well, they don’t come out and say it, but it’s pretty clear reading between the lines…” She checked the date on the top of the page. “This didn’t come out until after the Civil War. Raven’s Eyrie was a ‘station’ on the Underground Railroad.”

“The Culp’s were Abolitionists? That doesn’t sound like the Culp we know and love.”

“Her name was Julia Reidhead. She was a member of the American Anti-Slavery Society. But according to this, the Hudson Valley was not Abolitionist. They still kept slaves into the early nineteenth century. Only a few Quaker strongholds were against slavery.”

“Grandpa Culp must have been a brave man to be a station master.”

“It doesn’t quite say that. According to this, Julia Reidhead talked him into building a secret entrance through the wall so they could help runaway slaves on their way to Canada. Sounds to me like he did it for love.”

“Was she J. B. Culp’s grandmother?” Helen asked.

“No. She ended up marrying a missionary. They served in India.”

Helen read the story over Marion’s shoulder. “I hadn’t realized the wall was that old.”

“First thing they built. It seems the Culps have never liked other people.”

Antonio Branco walked into J. B. Culp’s trophy room and calmly announced, “The Italian Squad just arrested my assassin.”

“What? Can you bail him out?”

“The Carabinieri confirmed he’s an anarchist. He will stay locked up until your government deports him.”

“How could they confirm it so fast?”

“The Italian Consul General keeps a Carabinieri officer on his staff for just such occasions,” Branco answered drily.

“What a mess!.. Wait a minute. How did the police know he was yours?”

“They don’t. He was one of many caught in Petrosino’s dragnet.”

“Bloody Isaac Bell put Petrosino up to it.”

“Of course he did,” said Branco. “I would be surprised if he hadn’t. Thanks to Bell, there isn’t an Italian radical who isn’t behind bars or in hiding this morning.”

“We’re running out of time. Roosevelt’s going to be here in two days.”

Branco tugged his watch chain. “Two days and six hours.”

“Well, dammit, you’ll just have to give the job to your ‘gorillas.’”

“No.”

“Why not? They’re killers, aren’t they? All your talk about ‘un-plaguing’ me. Strikebreaking, getting rid of reformers, making enemies disappear?”

“Gorillas are not the tool for this job.”

“Why not?”

“They would bungle it.”

“Then you’ll have to kill him yourself.”

Branco shrugged his broad shoulders as if monumentally unconcerned. “I suspected it would come to this.”

Culp shook his head in disgust. “You sound mighty cool about it. How will you do it?”

“I’ve planned for it.”

“You’ll only get one chance. If you muddle it, you’ll force Roosevelt to hide, and we’ll never get a second shot at him.”

“I planned for it.”

“Do you mean you planned to pull the trigger all along?”

“I never planned to pull a trigger” was Branco’s enigmatic reply, and Culp knew him well enough by now to know he had heard all that Branco would spill on the subject. Instead, he said, “Did you get the Italian Consul General invited to the President’s speech?”

Culp nodded. “Why do you want him there?”

“He will provide a distraction.”

“You don’t know yet how you’re going to do the job.”

“I have ideas,” said Branco.

Marion Morgan and Helen Mills’ report on the Underground Railroad entrance to Raven’s Eyrie emphasized the strong pro-slavery sentiments in the pre — Civil War Hudson Valley. So while the Black Hand Squad watched gates and boat landings, and undercover operatives kept an eye on the siphon tunnel, Isaac Bell and Archie Abbott climbed down from the top of Storm King Mountain. In theory, the Abolitionists’ passage for fugitive slaves would have been more safely hidden in the uphill side of the estate wall rather than in view of the busy river.

Slipping and sliding on a thin coat of ice-crusted snow, the Van Dorns descended within yards of the wall, then scrambled alongside, just above it, clinging from tree to tree on the steep wooded slope. Culp’s estate workers had kept a mown path clear of brush, but the stones were laced with ancient vines of grape and bittersweet that in summertime would have blocked any hope of spotting a break in the eighty-year-old masonry. Now that the leaves had fallen, they had a marginal chance of spotting a long-abandoned opening put back in use by Antonio Branco.

“Cunningly concealed,” Archie noted. “Seeing as how the neighbors would have loved to turn in Grandpa and his Quaker. Not to mention collecting the bounty on the poor slaves.”

Isaac Bell was optimistic. “Nice thing about a wall — if we can’t see in, they can’t see us poking around outside.” He was right. The two-mile wall lacked the regularly spaced turrets of a true fortress. And while the main gatehouse overlooked some of the front section — and the service entrance tower and some of the south side — neither was close enough to observe the back side.

“Are you forgetting that Mr. Van Dorn said don’t set foot on Culp’s estate?”

“As I recall,” said Bell, less worried about getting fired and more about the President being murdered, “Mr. Van Dorn said, in effect, no Van Dorn detective is to scale the Raven’s Eyrie wall again without his express permission. He didn’t say I couldn’t go through it. Or under it. Or lay a trap inside it to ambush Branco.”

“We’ve still got to find it.”

“We have two days,” said Bell.

But his optimism proved futile. They probed the full half mile of the uphill wall before darkness closed in but found nothing. “The Culps could have cemented it shut after the Civil War,” said Archie. “Or maybe the ladies turned up another quaint old Hudson Valley legend.”

40

In Wallabout Basin, across the East River from Manhattan, battleship USS Connecticut raised steam for a maiden voyage unique in the history of the Brooklyn Navy Yard.

Shipbuilders and sailors swarmed over her guns, searchlights, superstructure, and decks, harassed by frantic officers exhorting them to paint, polish, and holystone faster. Put in commission only two months ago, and scheduled to head south for her shakedown cruise, Connecticut suddenly had new orders: Convey the Commander-in-Chief forty-five miles up the Hudson River.

To the great relief of her officers, icebreakers were clearing the channel only as far as West Point. So many things could go wrong on a brand-new ship that the sooner the Navy men landed President Roosevelt at the Military Academy pier, the fewer chances of a humiliating disaster. With luck, she would steam back to Brooklyn deemed worthier than her archrival USS Louisiana to be flagship of an American cruise around the world — while TR toured the Catskill Aqueduct by train and auto, shaking a thousand hands.

The south wall of Raven’s Eyrie, which was closest to the main mansion, was divided midway by the service gate tower, which overlooked long sections in both directions. The Van Dorns who peered through a spy hole in the hogshead barrel had reported seeing no gatekeeper watching at night. But Bell was taking no chances. He and Archie Abbott made a thorough search of the sections in sight of the tower before dawn. They pressed farther along the wall in daylight but found no hidden passage and no indication that one had ever existed.

The Raven’s Eyrie north wall was almost as remote as the hillside wall the Van Dorns had first searched, though here and there they could glimpse the rooftops and chimneys of a neighboring estate house. Someone watching with good field glasses might notice two men creeping through the trees along Culp’s wall. But it seemed unlikely they would pick up the telephone to warn Culp when he and Archie could easily be stone masons making repairs or the estate foresters clearing brush. They traversed the full half mile of wall and again saw no relic of the Underground Railroad. All that remained unobserved was the long wall that faced the river, but they had lost the light.

Bell told Archie Abbott, “I’m worried he’ll use a sniper. You’re the only outdoorsman on the squad. The rest are city boys. Mark off a five-hundred-yard perimeter of the road to the siphon shaft and search every possible sniper hide. I’ll take the ice yacht tomorrow.”

“We will plan my escape,” said Antonio Branco.

“Miles ahead of you,” said Culp. “My train will have steam up and be designated a special on the Delaware & Hudson’s main line to Albany. North of Albany, I’ll have the tracks cleared straight across the Canadian border and through Lacolle.”

“Are you sure the tracks will be cleared?”

Puzzlement creased Culp’s face. Who could impede his private train? As if to a child, he explained, “The Delaware & Hudson Railroad to Canada owns the Napier Junction Railroad in Canada.”

“Yes, but how can you be sure about the Delaware & Hudson?”

“I own the Delaware & Hudson.”

“Will Customs board your train at the border?”

“My man at Lacolle handles Customs.”

Branco nodded. “What is my other option?”

“With no radiator to freeze, my air-cooled Franklin is a superior winter auto. The chauffeur repaired her. I had trunks added for tools and food. And extra tanks of gasoline and oil. She’s ready to roll.”

“What is my third option?”

Culp was getting fed up with Branco grilling him. “Won’t a train or an auto be enough?”

“I can’t count on your train. What if the Van Dorns watch your train? I can’t count on your auto. What if they watch your auto? So if your train and your Franklin become stalking horses to fool the detectives, what is my third option?”

Culp wondered what option Brewster Claypool would have come up with. Then realized that if Claypool were still around, he would be in way over his head. A wintery grin took hold of Culp’s face, an expression that combined cold calculation, deep satisfaction, and deeper pride.

“Your third option is a beaut.”

Starting at dawn, Isaac Bell pinned his last hope of finding Branco’s secret way in and out of Raven’s Eyrie on the river side of the estate, having found nothing in back or at either end. All he had left to search was the wall that angled up from the boat landing, but the weather was not making it easy.

Squalls rampaged up from the narrows of West Point and down from the mountains. They were tight little storms, with several often in sight. The temperature plummeted moments before one struck, and visibility dropped from many miles to mere feet, warning Isaac Bell to hold on tight. Hard knots of wind-whipped snow banged his sail, threatening to stand the ice yacht up on one runner and dump him out of the car.

The latest squall raced off as suddenly as it hit. The morning sun glared on the snow-dusted hills.

Bell juggled the tiller and field glasses, keeping one eye on an enormous lateen-rigged Poughkeepsie Club boat tearing after him and the other probing the fir trees that spread from inside the wall up the slope toward the gigantic barnlike building that housed Culp’s gymnasium. A thinner group of firs and leafless hardwoods speckled the slope outside the wall.

He cut upwind of the Poughkeepsie boat, challenging it to a race, which gave him cover for a closer look. He noticed a clump of rocks in the woods and swept them with the glasses. Intrigued, he nudged the tiller to steer too close to the wind. The sails shivered. The ice yacht slowed. The Poughkeepsie boat pulled ahead.

It was hard to tell through the trees, but the rocks appeared to be close to the wall almost as if the wall had been built on top of them. Bell glanced about. As luck would have it, a squall was dancing down the mountain. He waited for it to envelop Culp’s mansion and outbuildings, and when they were curtained by the swirling snow, he steered for the shore.

Isaac Bell ran the ice yacht off the river, crunched the bowsprit into the frozen bank, threw a line around a driftwood log, and jumped off. The wall was set back a hundred yards from the shoreline. When he ran toward it, he discovered that the trees had obscured a rough road that looped down toward the town of Cornwall Landing. It had been traveled recently. Hoofprints, manure, and wagon tracks in the frozen snow.

Bell spotted a line of footprints. Boot marks came and went from the direction of the rock formation he had seen from the boat, blended with the wagon tracks, and disappeared. Two men, maybe three. He knelt down and looked more closely. One man. All the tracks had been imprinted by the same soles. One man walking from the wall and back again repeatedly. Here and there, they were deeper, as if he had carried a heavy load on one of the trips from the wall.

Wind shrieked suddenly.

The squall that had enveloped Culp’s buildings had continued down the mountainside and struck like a runaway freight. Snow and sleet clattered through the trees. Blinding bursts of it filled in the footprints and covered the wagon tracks. Bell moved quickly beside the fading footmarks and traced them through the trees to the wall. It rested, as he had glimpsed earlier, on a rock outcropping.

A branch broke from a tree with a loud crack. The heavy widow-maker scythed down through the snow and crashed to the ground beside him. More cracking noises sent him diving for cover under an overhang in the rocks. Broken branches rained down on the space Bell had vacated. Moments later, the squall raced away, the wind abated, and the sun filtered down through the treetops.

Bell peered among the dark stones that had sheltered him. He lit a match. The orange flame penetrated the dark, and Bell saw that the overhang was the mouth of a cave. He opened his jacket to free up his pistol and crawled inside.

41

Isaac Bell’s second match revealed a masonry ceiling that arched over a narrow passageway. He moved in deeper, and before he needed to strike a third, daylight illuminated an opening. He emerged to find himself among the hemlocks inside J. B. Culp’s wall. A mere dusting of snow had penetrated the trees, and the footsteps were easy to trace up the slope.

The trees began to thin out. Lawns, lightly snow-covered, spread ahead and to the left for two hundred yards up to the pillared main mansion. The trees continued thinning to the right, toward the immense, barnlike building that housed the gymnasium. Bell saw the tracks veer toward it. Employing what little cover the remaining trees provided, he moved up the hill until he reached the ground floor side entrance to the servants’ quarters, where the boxers Lee and Barry had lived when he was here last.

He tried the door. The knob turned freely.

Two narrow beds were draped with muslin dust cloths. The steam radiator was shut off, and it felt almost as cold inside the room as outdoors. A rank odor hung in the air. The scent puzzled Bell. It was not quite a gymnasium locker room aroma. Sharper than the stale stink of sweating boxers, it smelled more like a kennel than a locker room, but even ranker than a kennel. A decomposing body? he wondered fleetingly. But there was no body in the room. And, besides, it reeked of life, not death.

A recollection of something totally different flashed through his mind. It was so odd that he wondered was it a lingering effect of his long asphyxiation sleep. He did not smell shoe polish, but for some reason he suddenly had a vivid memory of blacking his hair to masquerade as a Hebrew needlework contractor in Little Italy.

Footsteps sounded directly overhead.

Out the interior door in an instant, Bell found stairs and vaulted up them silently.

He drew his pistol, held it at his side, muzzle pointed at the floor, and stepped through an open door. Another empty room, but considerably larger and more finely appointed, with a fur coverlet on an enormous bed, an easy chair, a carved writing desk, and a matching case full of books. A fire burned low in the hearth. A black kettle hung in the corner of the fireplace, and a pot for brewing coffee stood beside silver cream and sugar service. Pot, pitcher, and bowl were almost empty. If this was where Culp housed Antonio Branco, out of sight of the servants in the main house and near the Underground Railroad passage, the gangster had been here within the hour.

“Oh!”

A middle-aged housemaid had just stepped from the bathroom with an armload of towels. “You gave me a fright.”

Bell holstered his weapon as she squinted nearsightedly across the room. “It’s Mr. Bell, isn’t it? I’m Rachel. You stayed at the main house when Mrs. Culp was still here.”

“Who stayed in this room?”

“I have no idea, sir. They just sent me down this morning to clean up. Most everyone’s gone to New York City.”

“When did the man staying here leave?”

“I guess this morning. The fire’s still burning.”

“Where could I find Mr. Culp?”

“I don’t know, sir… I’ve got to get back to the house. Is there anything else you need, sir?”

“Wait one moment, please. What is that smell?” He smelled it here, too, but fainter.

Still holding the towels, she sniffed the air. “What smell? The coffee?”

“No. Something else. Like a zoo.”

“There’s a zoo next door.”

“A zoo?”

“A dead zoo. Where he keeps the creatures he shoots.”

“The trophy room?”

“Lions, tigers, and bears. Maybe you smell a new one, just stuffed.”

She pointed Bell down the hall and rushed off.

Bell hurried past a secretarial cubby hole, which was equipped with a typewriter, telephone, and telegraph key. A fortress door blocked the end of the hall, studded with hand-forged nailheads and secured high and low by iron bolts. Bell slid them open and pulled the door toward him. It swung heavily on concealed hinges, and the tall detective walked under an arch of elephant tusks into a two-story, windowless room lighted brightly by electricity.

Culp’s big game kills were preserved, stuffed, and mounted as if they were alive.

Lions roamed the floor. Panthers crouched on tree limbs and boulders. An elephant charged, ears spread wide, trunk upraised. Horned heads loomed from three walls. A taxidermied grizzly bear reared.

Suits of armor gleamed on either side of Culp’s desk. Arrayed behind it were express rifles and sidearms, bird guns, daggers, cutlasses, and swords. Bell spotted an empty space where a pistol was missing, and another, longer telltale space in a section of rifles with telescope sights. He sniffed the air but smelled no odor of the zoo, only leather, gun oil, and cigars.

When suddenly he felt a presence, he glided behind a panther and drew his pistol.

“Bell,” called J. B. Culp. “You keep turning up like a bad penny.”

The magnate was in the hall, one hand on the nailheaded door. In the other, he held a revolver. Bell recognized the highly accurate Colt Bisley Target Model by its flat top strap.

He braced his own gun barrel between the big cat’s ears. “Drop the gun and raise your hands.”

Culp turned sideways like a duelist and took deliberate aim.

Isaac Bell fired one shot at the only man who could tell him how Branco would attack the President. He hit the gun squarely. The Bisley glittered in the lights as it spun through the air. J. B. Culp clutched his hand and bellowed in pain.

Bell bounded toward him, commanding, “Elevate!”

Culp slammed the door in Bell’s face and drove the bolts home.

Bell raced the length of the room, weaving through the trophies. The only other door he had seen was in an alcove. It was smaller than the fortress door and was secured by a single bolt. He slid the bolt open. But the door was still locked, bolted like the fortress door, from outside as well. He threw his shoulder against it. It stood firm as masonry.

He ran to the telephone on the rosewood desk to call the Van Dorn detective who was tapping the line. It rang before he reached it. He picked it up and said, “Stop this while you still can, Culp.”

“Sit tight,” said Culp. “I’ll send the Sheriff when he’s done guarding the President’s speech and he’ll arrest you for trespassing again, stealing my 1903 Springfield rifle, and for shooting me when I caught you sneaking in to steal another.”

“Antonio Branco will squeal on you the second he’s arrested.”

“He won’t be arrested,” said Culp.

“The Van Dorn Agency won’t give up until he is. Never.”

“He won’t be arrested,” Culp repeated. “Guaranteed.”

The line went dead.

Bell’s eyes roamed the trophy room for a way out and fixed on the wall of weapons.

The suits of armor caught his eye.

One of them held a long jousting lance and it gave him an idea. He went back to the alcove door and inspected it closely. It was made of oak. A cold draft under it indicated it opened to the outside. All the better. He rapped it with his fist. Layers of oak, laminated crosswise to give the wood the strength of iron.

The alcove, like the main entry, was framed by eight-foot elephant tusks.

Bell took a broadsword from a suit of armor, chopped the brackets that held the bigger tusk, crouched down, and heaved the ivory onto his shoulder. It felt like it weighed a hundred and fifty pounds. He carried it across the trophy room, staggering around the taxidermied animals, and leaned it on the grizzly bear. He walked back, shoving stuffed lions and antelope and a warthog out of his way to clear a path. He used the broadsword to score a large X in the middle of the door.

Heading back to the grizzly, he kicked the zebra rugs out of the way.

He tipped the tusk toward the horizontal, clamped both hands under the massive weight, and held it tight to his side with the heavier root end aimed ahead. He filled his lungs with a deep breath and started across the trophy room, walking at first, then picking up speed.

He neared the door and fixed his eyes on the X.

He broke into a run.

Isaac Bell tore through the alcove and rammed one hundred fifty pounds of ivory into the oak. It struck with a thunderous impact that smashed the door two inches out of its jamb. Cold air poured in the sliver of space he had opened. Bell threw his shoulder against it, but it wouldn’t budge. He dragged the tusk back across the trophy room, picked it up, and charged again.

The fourth try was the charm. The tusk blasted the door entirely out of its jamb and over the railing of a narrow balcony.

Bell dropped the tusk and clapped a hand on the railing to vault off the balcony. There he hesitated, thinking hard on what Francesca Kennedy had told him about Antonio Branco’s modus operandi. To get close to kill, you have to plan. Study the situation. Then make a plan.

Instead of jumping to the ground, Isaac Bell hurried back indoors.

Ten minutes later, he jumped from the balcony and raced through the hemlocks to the Underground Railroad cave. Outside the wall, he ran to the riverbank, kicked his runners loose from the grip of the ice, shoved the yacht around, and caught the wind.

There was not a squall in sight on the frozen river. The sky was a hard-edged blue, the visibility sharp, perfect for a sniper.

42

A nameless, faceless Italian dug a hole in the ground.

The Irish foreman patrolling the edge of the ditch stopped and stared. The laborer was older than most. He still had a thick head of hair, but it was grayer than his mustache. He was shoveling fast enough, but the orders today were to report on anything off-base… what, with the President coming.

“Who you?”

The Italian kept shoveling.

“Old guinea! Who you?”

An immigrant who knew a little English nudged the new man and said in Italian, “Give him your number.”

Eyes cast down, Antonio Branco handed over his pay token.

The foreman read the numeral stamped in the brass. “O.K. Get back to work!”

A thousand feet under the river, Wally Kisley prowled the pressure tunnel looking for where in the high-ceilinged passage hewn through granite he would hide a lethal charge if he were an anarchist or a criminal. The circular roof and sides were remarkably clean and smooth, there being no need to timber the strong rock. But the muck car rails on the floor provided numerous indentations that would hide a stick of dynamite. The contractor’s men had searched hourly, accompanied by a Secret Service operative, but Kisley had been hunting clues of sabotage since they were in short pants and trusted only his own experience. He inspected what remained of the face — the last barrier of natural rock between the western and eastern halves of the boring — where the final charges had been set, awaiting only the ceremonial pressing of an electric detonator by the President.

He knelt suddenly, switched on his flashlight, and froze.

The dynamite was virtually invisible, the stick having been inserted in a hole drilled in a wooden crosstie. The blasting cap, too, was neatly camouflaged and looked like a knot in the chestnut. The trigger was the giveaway. It had been fashioned to look like the head of one of the railroad spikes that held the track to the crosstie. But whereas the heads of the other spikes nearby were shiny, having been only recently pounded into the wood with a steel maul, the one that had caught his eye was rusty.

Down on all fours, resting his cheek on the splintery tie inches from the spike, Kisley saw a space under the head. There was no nail, merely a detached head waiting to be driven into the blasting cap by the weight of the first person who stepped on it. The result would be simple physics. TNT was so stable you could run it over with a wagon and nothing would happen, but a blasting cap would go off if you looked at it cross-eyed. Jarred by the spike-head trigger, the cap would explode with the force to detonate the dynamite.

Kisley laid out his pocket tools to disarm the booby trap. He thought it was a miracle that no one had stumbled on it already.

Archie Abbott marked four possible sniper hides in the wooded slopes around the siphon shaft house, and Isaac Bell dispatched a man with a shotgun to cover each. Another man was guarding the roof of a redbrick warehouse that overlooked the road.

Abbott followed a hunch he had had all morning about an empty summer boardinghouse. It was a full seven hundred yards from the raised platform where the President would speak — an extremely long shot — but Abbott had had a feeling every time he caught the white clapboard building in the corner of his eye.

The house was as deserted inside as it looked from the outside, with dust cloths thrown over furniture and curtains folded in closets, but he prowled room by room, just to be sure, and even climbed into the attic to look for loopholes. He was making one last pass through the second floor when he noticed a table in a window. It seemed an odd place to put a table. Unless it was a rifle rest.

He found the rifle in the closet.

Eddie Edwards watched J. B. Culp’s train crew coal and water the tender. The locomotive had steam up. The cook received deliveries from a butcher wagon and a bakery.

“He’s ready to go somewhere,” he reported to Isaac Bell. “I’ve got fellows at the Delaware & Hudson and the New York Central checking whether Culp’s ordered clearance for a special. But I can’t count on them since Culp owns most of the lines around here.”

Bell asked, “Is Culp’s auto still in his garage?”

Edwards nodded. “Harry’s got little Richie up a tree with field glasses.”

USS Connecticut’s great white hull turned majestically in midstream, hauled around by tugs at her bow and stern, and before she followed her icebreaker back down the Hudson River, the battleship bid the President godspeed with a twenty-one-gun salute. The final retort was still reverberating from the hilltops when a grinning Theodore Roosevelt jumped from the 20-foot gasoline dory that had sped him ashore.

As if propelled through the air by the warship’s thunder, thought Joseph Van Dorn.

Roosevelt landed nimbly on the Military Academy pier. He shook hands with the commandant. He waved to the citizens crowding the ferry wharf and the West Shore Railroad Station. He saluted the ramparts of the stone fort on the bluff, which were gray with cadets in their full-dress coats. Then, surprising no one, especially Van Dorn, he gave a speech.

He thanked the Army grandly for its welcome, the citizens of West Point for turning out to greet him in such a bitter cold, and the United States Navy for its “hearty salute, which reminds all Americans gathered here that we look forward to the day when disputes between nations are settled by arbitration, but, until then, Connecticut’s mighty twelves will do our arbitrating for us.”

It fell to the chief of the President’s Secret Service corps to spoil the mood with an abrupt change of plans. “We will not board the train — with your permission, Mr. President — but embark directly from here in the White Steamer.”

“Why? Storm King expects me on the train, not in an auto.”

“That is precisely why, sir. To confuse any enemy counting on you to arrive as scheduled at the station. The drive is only five miles and the road isn’t bad.”

“Whose idea was this?”

“It was Joseph Van Dorn’s idea.”

“I should have guessed.”

“When I told him that you might not be one hundred percent pleased, he said that a war hero like yourself would recall the power of surprise.”

“I am in the hands of the professionals,” President Roosevelt intoned, but a dangerous glint in his eye informed the chief of his protection corps not to take any more liberties.

Joseph Van Dorn waited beside the big White Steamer, wearing a slouch hat, a polka-dot bandanna, and wire-framed spectacles. He held the automobile door for the President and said, “I would appreciate it if we would raise the top.”

Roosevelt looked him over sharply.

“What happened to your face?”

“I shaved my sideburns.”

“What are you up to, Joe? You don’t wear specs, but you’re wearing specs — without glass in them. And what’s that hat doing on your head? You weren’t a Rough Rider; you were a United States Marine.”

“Confusing the enemy,” said Van Dorn.

“Has it occurred to you that if you confuse them too successfully, you’ll be the one shot?”

Van Dorn answered with a straight face. “The voters spoke loud and clear, Mr. President. Not one of them voted for me.”

“The top stays down.”

Van Dorn said, “Would you read this wire from Detective Bell?”

“The 1903 Springfield is—”

“A deadly sniper rifle,” the President completed Van Dorn’s warning. “O.K. You win! Raise the top.”

Van Dorn and the chief quickly unfolded the canvas and locked its framework. The chief got behind the wheel. Van Dorn climbed in next to him.

“That make you happy?” the President called from the backseat. “You don’t look happy. Now what’s wrong?”

“If you’d agreed earlier, you would have saved my whiskers.”

Roosevelt poked the canvas with his finger. “This top is going right back down at Storm King.”

“Leave your shovels,” the Irish foreman bellowed at the pick and shovel gang grading a drainage ditch. “All a youse.” He pointed at the road to the shaft house. “Get up there with the rest of ’em.”

A thousand Italian laborers already lined the road, six deep on either side, a festive crowd celebrating the unheard-of luxury of paid time off. The contractor had handed out bread and sausages. Wine bottles hidden under coats washed it down. Accordions wheezed, drowned out by an organ grinder’s jaunty tunes that carried in the clear, cold air like a miniature steam calliope. Rumors flew that the great Caruso would appear with the beauteous Tetrazzini. Best of all, the President of the United States—Il Presidente himself — the famous Spanish-American War hero Colonel TR — was coming all the way to Storm King to thank them for digging a “bully” aqueduct.

“Get up there! He’s on his way.”

They scrambled out of the ditch and raced to the road. Head still bowed, hat brim shadowing his face, eyes fixed on his boots, and slouching to disguise his height, Antonio Branco struggled to keep up, limping like an old man.

The foreman urged them into line, then swaggered into the road and cupped his hands to his mouth.

“Listen, all a youse,” he bawled, beckoning the young laborer he used to translate orders on the job. “Tell ’em, when the President comes by, take off your hats and cheer real loud.”

The translator rendered the order into Italian.

“If, God forbid, the President was to take it in his head to stop and talk to you, hold your hat over your heart and nod your head and give him a big smile.”

The translator repeated that.

“When he speechifies, tell ’em watch me. When I clap, they clap hands like it’s an Eye-talian opera.”

The Irishman pantomimed applause.

“And the second after the President goes down the shaft, I want to see a stampede of guineas running back to work.”

Antonio Branco wedged his way toward the front of the crowd on a path surreptitiously cleared by Black Hand gorillas. They were dressed convincingly as laborers, but the legitimate pick and shovel men instinctively steered clear of them. Branco stationed himself in the second row, where the crowd was thickest, just behind the organ grinder.

The organ grinder reached inside the instrument and shifted the barrel sideways to change the tune. Then he resumed turning the crank that made the barrel move the keys and the bellows blow air in the pipes. His monkey, costumed for the occasion like a Roosevelt Rough Rider in a polka-dot bandanna and blue shirt, went back to work catching pennies in a miniature slouch hat.

The immigrants lining the road exchanged puzzled looks. Instead of the familiar romantic strains of “Celeste Aida” or a rollicking tarantella, the street organ piped out a lively American march.

Only laborers who had been in America long enough to have worked digging the New York Interborough Rapid Transit subway back in ’04, recognized a Republican campaign song bellowed by Roosevelt voters.

“Il Presidente!” they explained to later arrivals. “Il Presidente canto.”

The translator shouted the title of the song.

“‘You’re all right, Teddy!’”

43

Isaac Bell strode up and down the road leading to the siphon tunnel shaft.

They had built a reviewing stand near the shaft house and hung it with bunting that flapped cheerfully in the bitter wind. The stand was packed with contractors and city officials in overcoats and top hats. Luisa Tetrazzini and Enrico Caruso huddled there, both barely visible wrapped in woolen mufflers. Italy’s elegant white-haired Consul General for New York City sat between the opera stars, beaming like he had won the Lottery.

Wally Kisley hurried after Bell to report on the booby trap he had defused. He thought that the hard-driving young detective looked as if he were hoping he could somehow search out the intentions in every one of the thousand faces before the President arrived.

“Isaac!”

Bell cut Kisley off before he could say another word.

“Look inside that street organ. It’s big enough to hold a bomb, and the auto’s going to pass right in front of it.”

“On my way… Then I got to talk to you.”

“Take Harry Warren to talk Italian to the organ grinder. If the old guy’s scared we’re stealing his livelihood, it’ll start a riot.”

Warren engaged the organ grinder in conversation and finally persuaded him to stop cranking for a moment. Kisley looked it over, inside and out. He felt under it and leaned down to inspect the leg that propped up the heavy instrument. When he was satisfied, he nodded his O.K. and stuffed a dollar into the monkey’s hat. Then he hurried back to Bell and paced alongside him while he described the booby trap in the pressure tunnel.

“How’d you spot it?” Bell’s eyes were flickering like metronomes.

“I’d seen it before… But here’s the funny thing, Isaac. It was sloppy work.”

Bell looked at him, sharply. “What do you mean?”

“It could have gone off at any moment. Before the President even got down in the tunnel.”

“But you told me they were masters of dynamite.”

“Either these ones weren’t or they got lazy.”

“Or,” said Bell, “they’re blowing smoke to lull us. Archie found a Springfield rifle in a sniper hide.”

“Just sitting there?” asked Kisley.

“In a closet.”

“I don’t mean to take away from Archie’s investigative talents, but that sounds a little too easy.”

“Archie thought so, too. He didn’t believe the rifle. You don’t believe the booby trap. I don’t believe either. So far all we see is what Branco wants us to see.”

Walter Kisley said, “So what does he not want us to see?”

“I still say he’s going to do it in close. But I still don’t know how.”

“And here comes Teddy. “

Isaac Bell had already spotted the White Steamer creeping through the throng. The auto was wide open, its top down, with President Roosevelt clearly visible in the backseat. The chief of his Secret Service corps was driving. Joe Van Dorn was up front with him, riding shotgun.

Bell broke into a long-legged stride.

“Slow down,” ordered the President. “They’ve been standing hours in the cold waiting to see me. Let them see me.”

The chief exchanged wary glances with Van Dorn.

“Slower, I say!”

The chief shifted the speed lever to low. The White slacked to a walking pace.

Van Dorn loosened the firearm in his shoulder holster for the fourth time since they arrived at Cornwall Landing and the President ordered the top lowered. The only good news — other than knowing he had his top detectives in the case — was the height of the Steamer. The auto rode as high off the ground as a stage coach, which meant that criminals and anarchists intending to jump into the open auto had some climbing to do. Otherwise, the attacker held every advantage: surprise; a mob of people to spring from and melt back into; the automobile’s glacial pace; and the victim’s open heart.

The President was grinning from ear to ear. The car rolled slowly between applauding rows of engineers and contractors’ clerks and machine operators, who poured into the road behind the automobile and followed in the parade the President had demanded. Next were Negro rock drillers, cheering mightily.

“Honk the horn for them, Joe!” TR shouted. “The Spaniards called our colored regiments ‘Smoked Yankees,’ but the Rough Riders found them to be an excellent breed of Yankees covering our flanks.”

Van Dorn stomped on the rubber bulb and the White let loose a gay Auuuugha!

The rock drillers peeled out of their rows and joined the march.

Ahead waited legions of mustachioed, swarthy Italian laborers in brimmed hats. They were quiet, lining the road six deep on either side. But they smiled like they meant it, and Van Dorn had the funny thought that by the time the celebrity President got through with them, he’d convert them all to the Republican Party.

When Roosevelt heard their street organ, his grin doubled and redoubled.

“Do you recognize the tune that organ grinder’s playing?”

“‘You’re all right, Teddy!’” chorused Van Dorn and the Secret Service chief.

“Bully!” shouted the President. His fist beat the time on his knee and he broke into song.

“Stop the auto! I’m going to thank these people personally.”

44

The President jumped down from the White Steamer before it stopped rolling.

Van Dorn and the corps chief flanked him instantly. Too excited to wait to join the end of the parade, the crowd surged at them from both sides.

“Did you see what that monkey’s wearing?”

Van Dorn was trying to look in every direction at once. “What was that, sir?”

“The monkey’s hat!” said Roosevelt. “He’s wearing a Rough Rider’s hat… Chief! Fetch that Consul General.”

“I can’t leave your side, sir.”

“Hop to it, man. I need a translator.”

Suddenly, Isaac Bell was there, saying, “I’ll cover.”

“Of course,” whispered Antonio Branco when Isaac Bell materialized in the space vacated by the Secret Service bodyguard. “Where else would you be?”

Then the crowd pushing forward blocked his view of the President. At the same time, it blocked Bell’s view of the elderly Sicilian groom cranking the street organ. With every eye fixed on President Roosevelt, it was all the cover Branco needed. He slipped in front of the old man and took the crank in his right hand and the monkey’s chain in his left. Not a note of music was lost, and a gentle tug of the chain made the animal jump on his shoulder, having learned in just a few days that its kindly new master would reward it with a segment of an orange.

“Step back, both of you,” ordered the President.

“Mr. President, for your safety—”

“You’re too tall. You make me look like a coward. These are hardworking men. They won’t hurt me.”

Roosevelt grasped hands with the nearest laborer. “Hello there. Thank you for building the aqueduct.”

The laborer whipped off his hat, pressed it to his heart, and smiled.

“I know you don’t understand a word I just said, but you will when you learn English.” He pumped his hand harder. “The point is, building this aqueduct with the sweat of your brow will benefit all of us.”

Roosevelt grabbed the next man’s hand. “Hello there. Thank you. You’re doing a bully job.”

“Bully!” echoed the laborer. “Bully! Bully! Bully!” And Isaac Bell saw that if Roosevelt hadn’t been sure of his welcome, he was now. Beaming like a locomotive headlamp, he grabbed more hands. They were almost to the organ grinder.

“Where the devil’s that translator?”

“I see him coming,” said Bell.

The chief of the Secret Service protection corps was gripping Italy’s Consul General for New York City like a satchel. Both were gasping for breath from their hard run.

“Mr. President, it is a great honor—”

“I want you to translate to the organ grinder that I am deeply touched that he played my campaign song and dressed his monkey in a Rough Rider hat. That takes the kind of clear-eyed gumption that makes a top-notch American… Boys,” he shot over his shoulder at Isaac Bell and Van Dorn. “I told you to stand back. You, too, chief. Give these Eye-talians a chance to enjoy themselves.”

He threw an arm around the Consul General and plowed ahead. “Tell him I had a monkey friend living next door when I was a little boy. I always wanted one, but I had to settle for Uncle Robert’s. Tell him I like monkeys, always have… There he is! Hello, monkey.”

The little animal tugged off its hat and held it out.

“Bell? Van Dorn? You have any money?”

In the midst of the tumult, Isaac Bell smelled shoe polish again and this time he knew why. It had nothing to do with an eight-day stupor and everything to do with the memory of smelling an organ grinder’s monkey on Elizabeth Street while he was disguised with black shoe polish in his hair. And he knew now what set off the memory: the zoo smell in Antonio Branco’s room at Raven’s Eyrie.

President Roosevelt dropped Joseph Van Dorn’s coin into the monkey’s hat and reached out to shake the organ grinder’s hand. The bent and grizzled old man sprang to his full height, whipped open a knife, and thrust.

Isaac Bell stepped in front of Theodore Roosevelt.