The Gangster (13 page)

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

“It may be nothing.”

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

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

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

Van Dorn turned to Isaac Bell.

“What do you think?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Isaac Bell and Joseph Van Dorn exchanged a glance.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Crime?”

“Someone stole Madame Récamier’s dress.”

“What?”

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

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

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

“What can I do for you, sir?”

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

“What?”

“We have a mutual friend in law enforcement.”

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

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

“But what did you hear?”

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

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

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

“How do you know?”

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

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

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

“What did you hear?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Where is he?”

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

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

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

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

Kisley and Fulton met him at 40th Street.

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

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

“What’s he doing here?”

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

“There he is!”

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

“I’ll take him. You boys hang back.”

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

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

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

Wally Kisley and Mack Fulton caught up with Bell.

“Those are Charlie Salata gorillas.”

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

“Now where’s he going?” said Kisley.

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

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

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

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

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

“You pay-a de mon-ee?”

“How mooch-a?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Where’s their horns?” asked McBean.

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

“Somebody stole our horns.”

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

“Sons of bitches unscrewed them.”

Their wagon driver ran up.

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

“Yeah? So?”

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

“Where’d they go?”

“Across 36th Street.”

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

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