The Gangster (35 page)

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.

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?”

LOST BRANCO
CULP’S 1903 SPRINGFIELD GONE

“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.