Blackstone and the New World (7 page)

Meade showed the man his identification and said, ‘We’re investigating the shooting that happened last night.’

The barman nodded. ‘But why did you take so long?’ he asked, in a heavy accent.

‘I beg your pardon?’ Meade said.

The bartender shrugged. ‘In Chermany, we would already have the killer behind bars by now.’

‘Were you here in the biergarten when it happened?’ Meade asked, ignoring the criticism.

‘I was, but I was working, and so I did not see anything.’

Meade gave Blackstone a look which said, ain’t that just the way of the world? Whenever there’s a shooting – or any other serious incident – nobody’s
ever
seen anything.

The sergeant took his notebook out of his pocket. ‘I’ll need the names of anyone else who you remember seeing here at the time.’

‘Of course,’ the barman agreed, but instead of beginning to recite a list of names, he reached for a sheet of paper which was lying on one of the shelves behind him, and laid it down on the bar in front of Meade.

The piece of paper had two long columns of words written on it, and the barman pointed his finger at the first column.

‘These are the names of the people who were here,’ he said.

It was a very long list.

‘This is
everyone
who was here?’ Meade asked, incredulously.

‘Naturally,’ the barman replied, as if it were inconceivable to him that anyone who had been there at the time
wouldn’t
be on the list. ‘And these,’ he continued, pointing to the second column, ‘are their addresses.’

‘What do the stars that you’ve put against some of the names mean?’ Meade asked.

‘Ah, those are the men who think that they might have something useful to tell you,’ the barman explained.

Meade did his best to suppress a gasp of astonishment, and didn’t quite make it.

‘Are any of these people here now?’ he asked.

The barman looked around. ‘Several of them.’

‘I’ll need a room,’ Meade said. ‘Somewhere quiet, in which I can talk to them.’

‘Of course,’ the barman said. ‘You may use the manager’s office. It has been waiting for you since this morning.’

Meade abandoned any attempt to appear unimpressed.

‘You’ve been very efficient,’ he said admiringly.

‘Naturally,’ the barman agreed. ‘I am Cherman.’

‘So you saw Inspector O’Brien just before he was killed, Mr Schultz?’ Meade asked the fat German who was sitting at the opposite side of the table in the cramped manager’s office.

‘Yes, I saw him,’ Schultz agreed. ‘I was waiting for a friend to arrive, so I was watching the door. I noticed O’Brien because he was so different to the other customers.’

‘Different in what way?’

Schultz smiled. ‘In what way do you think? This is a
German
biergarten. I know most of the people who drink here, and if I do not, I know someone else who knows them. It is like one big club and we are not used to strangers. It is not that we have anything against them – it is simply that we have nothing to say to them, and they have nothing to say to us.’

‘I understand,’ Meade said.

‘The only non-Germans who ever enter this building are policemen. And they only come to pick up their . . . their . . .’

Schultz stopped speaking, and seemed to have developed a sudden fascination for the table top.

‘And they only come in to pick up their bribes?’ Meade supplied.

‘I know nothing of the reason for their visits,’ Schultz lied. He raised his head again, but would still not look Meade in the eye. ‘But to return to Herr O’Brien,’ he continued hastily, ‘I found myself wondering what he was doing here.’

‘And what
was
he doing here?’ Meade asked.

‘He went to the bar and bought himself a beer. Then he stood looking at the door, as I had done.’

‘You think he was waiting for somebody?’

‘He may have been.’

‘And how did he seem?’

‘Seem?’

‘What was the expression on his face? What sort of mood did he appear to be in?’

‘Ah, so! He seemed excited. Or perhaps nervous. I do not know which one it was.’

‘And what happened next?’

‘He sipped his beer very slowly – not in the German way at all – and he kept looking at the door and checking his pocket watch. But no one came to join him, and in the end, looking very disappointed, he left. And it was just after he had stepped outside that I heard the shots.

‘How many of them were there?’

‘Two, I think. Or it may have been three.’

‘But you didn’t see anything?’

‘There is frosted glass on the door to the street. Besides, I was not really looking.’

Meade thanked Schultz for his time, and when the German had left, he turned to Blackstone and said, ‘The way I see it is that O’Brien was planning to meet someone who could give him information connected with his investigation.’

‘Possibly,’ Blackstone said cautiously.

‘And the
reason
he chose to hold the meeting here was because he knew that both he and his informant were very unlikely to meet anyone they knew in the biergarten.’

The facts, as far as they
had
any facts at all, would easily support Meade’s theory, Blackstone thought. But then they would just as easily support any one of half a dozen other theories.

‘It’s possible that O’Brien was meeting an informant,’ he said, ‘but it’s also possible that—’

‘But the sons-of-bitches who he was investigating somehow managed to find out about the meeting. So they dealt with his contact first – which explains why he never turned up – and then they set up an ambush for when Patrick O’Brien left the biergarten.’

‘It seems a very public place to have decided to kill him,’ Blackstone said dubiously.

‘It was late at night. There wouldn’t have been many people out on the street,’ Meade argued.

‘But there was still a chance that there would have been
some
,’ Blackstone countered. ‘Look, say you were a professional assassin, how would
you
go about your work?’

‘Since I’m
not
a professional assassin, Sam, I have no idea,’ Meade said stubbornly.

You really don’t want to explore this possibility, do you? Blackstone thought. But it has
to be
explored, nevertheless.

‘I’ll tell you how it works,’ he said. ‘The killer waits for the right opportunity – for the moment when there is no one in sight but himself and his target. His chance may come down a dark alley. It could be in a park. It could even be in the target’s home. But he will wait for that opportunity because he knows it will come
eventually
– even in a big bustling city like New York. The one thing that the professional assassin will
not
do is expose himself to any unnecessary risks. And that’s
exactly
what the killer did in this case.’

‘So if it’s not a professional killing, what
is
your explanation?’ Meade demanded, slightly aggressively.

‘I don’t have one,’ Blackstone admitted.

‘Well, there you are, then,’ Meade said, as if he had conclusively won the argument. ‘We go with what we have.’

But it didn’t work that way, Blackstone thought.

Three more witnesses confirmed that O’Brien had entered the bar alone – and left alone – and two of them were willing to agree that the inspector had looked either excited or nervous.

But it was with the fifth witness that they really hit pay dirt.

His name was Schiller, and he was a baker.

‘I start work very early in the morning,’ he said, ‘and that is why it is my unhappy lot to go home to my bed while all my friends are still here, enjoying their drinking.’

‘So when exactly did you leave?’ Meade asked.

‘I followed the dead man to the door. I was just behind him when he was shot.’

‘You seem very calm about the whole thing,’ Meade said, with a hint of suspicion entering his voice.

‘I am sorry?’

‘You saw a man shot to death in front of you. Most people would still be pretty shaken up by that, even a day later.’

Schiller shrugged. ‘When I was a young man, I was in the Bavarian Army. In ’66, we fought a war to defend south Germany from Prussian aggression.’ He shrugged again. ‘But the Prussians won, and only five years later I fought
for
them, against the French.’

‘What’s your point?’ Meade asked.

‘I have seen hundreds of men – good men – die in a single day. Last night, only one man died. It was not so much.’

Blackstone nodded, knowing exactly how the man felt.

‘What happened once you were out on the pavement, Mr Schiller?’ the inspector asked.

‘The pavement? What is that?’

‘The sidewalk.’

‘O’Brien . . . that was his name, was it not?’

‘Yes.’

‘O’Brien looked up and down the street.’

‘As if he was still expecting that his contact would turn up?’ Meade asked.

The German shook his head. ‘It was more as a soldier would look when he was behind enemy lines – he was checking for danger.’

‘So he must have seen his murderer coming towards him?’

‘Yes, he saw him.’

‘But he didn’t draw his revolver?’

‘No. I think he was going to, but then he saw that the person running towards him was only a
junge
– a boy.’

‘A boy!’ Meade exclaimed. ‘A damned
boy
!’

Blackstone gave his new partner a questioning look. He had no idea why the sergeant should have suddenly become excited, though it was unquestionable that he had.

‘What did this boy look like?’ Meade asked.

‘I did not see his face,’ Schiller replied. ‘It was quite dark. Besides, he was wearing a large cap, pulled down over his ears, and had a cloth of some kind covering the lower half of his face.’

‘What happened next?’

‘The boy stopped running, and took a gun out of his pocket. He fired three times and O’Brien fell to the ground,’ Schiller said, almost clinically. ‘Then the boy turned, and ran off down the street.’

‘Was he making what, when we were in the army, we would have called an “orderly retreat”?’ Blackstone asked.

‘No,’ Schiller said. ‘He was running blindly. He was very young, and cannot have killed many men. I think perhaps this was his first.’

‘The killer was a member of a gang,’ Meade said firmly once Schiller the baker had gone. ‘It’s most likely that he belongs to the Five Points Gang, though he could have been one of the Eastman crew.’

‘What makes you so
sure
that he was a member of a gang?’ Blackstone asked.

‘His age. This killing has all the signs of being an initiation rite – which gives us the answer to the question you were posing earlier!’

‘What question?’

‘You wondered why the killer shot Patrick O’Brien right outside a beer hall, when it would have been safer to wait until he got the inspector somewhere more secluded, didn’t you?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, initiation rites aren’t
supposed
to be safe – they’re
supposed
to be a test of the potential gang member’s nerve. This is just the sort of thing that Paul Kelly – who runs the Five Points Gang –
would
have come up with.’

‘Kelly,’ Blackstone repeated. ‘Is he an Irishman?’

Meade shook his head. ‘He’s an Italian, and so are most of the members of his gang. His real name’s Vaccareli, and he’s a truly vicious bastard.’

Why was Alex Meade looking so cheerful, when this new line of thinking would seem to blow his previous theory completely out of the water? Blackstone wondered.

‘So if we accept that it was an initiation rite, we must also accept that it had nothing to do with politics or corruption at all,’ he said.

‘You couldn’t be wronger about that,’ Meade told him. ‘You see, Sam, the Five Points Gang – which, as far as we know, has around six hundred members – works for the Tammany Hall political machine.’

‘In what way?’

‘In the same way that
everybody else
who works for Tammany does, to a greater or lesser extent. It helps to fix elections.’

‘How?’

‘In all kinds of ways. It intimidates Republican voters into supporting a straight Democratic ticket. It helps to falsify voter registration lists. It stuffs the ballot boxes with fake papers. Jesus Christ, Sam, in some wards there are more voters than there are actual inhabitants. In some wards, people who’ve been dead for ten years or more still manage to get down to the polling station to cast their votes. And that’s all down to groups of thugs like the Five Points Gang.’

‘And what does the gang itself get out of it?’ Blackstone asked. ‘Money?’

‘Oh, sure, it gets paid well enough for its dirty work,’ Meade said. ‘But more importantly, it earns itself friends in high places. And those friends are more than willing to give it the protection it needs.’

‘Protection?’ Blackstone repeated. ‘Who could an armed gang, which you say has over six hundred members, possibly need protection
from
?’

‘From the police!’ Meade said, as if the answer were obvious. ‘See, in between elections, the gang’s involved in prostitution, gambling, robbery, extortion – all kinds of criminal activities. We know
exactly
what they’re doing. But we
also
know that if we try to interfere, we’ll soon be out of a job. Do you see what I’m getting at, Sam?’

Blackstone nodded. ‘Wheels within wheels,’ he said.

‘Wheels within wheels,’ Meade agreed. ‘Say there are cops in Mulberry Street who can feel Inspector O’Brien breathing down their necks and are worried that any day now he’s going to arrest them. What do they do about it?’

‘They go to Tammany Hall and ask for help?’ Blackstone guessed.

‘Exactly! They go to Tammany Hall and ask for help,’ Meade agreed. ‘And somebody in Tammany
will
help them. Why?’